Aubrey Malone
War on Everyone (16)
No doubt you’ve heard the expression ‘Good cop, bad cop.’ Here it’s more like ‘Bad cop, bad cop’. From the moment Bob Bolano and Terry Monroe (Michael Pena and Alexander Skarsgard) jocosely run down a cocaine-dealing mime artist in their car it’s mayhem all the way in this British-Irish co-production featuring the aforementioned policemen committing every crime they can think of in the process of interrogating ‘suspects’ in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
John Michael McDonagh, the man who gave us Calvary and The Guard, has hinted that he always wanted to complete the trilogy initiated by these two blackly comic features. Is this it? Hardly.
While similar in tone to the former and in theme to the latter, it leaves Ireland (and Brendan Gleeson) behind, taking us into more commercial American terrain that betray nods to the likes of Elmore Leonard and Steven Soderbergh.
A would-be surreal version of Starsky and Hutch, it has Bob married to Dolores (Stephanie Sigman). Terry, meanwhile, is a redneck alcoholic whose main love, apart from beating people up, is the music of Glen Campbell. (This resounds throughout the movie like other ‘retro’ motifs). The police chief presiding over these two delightful individuals, Paul Reiser, continues to warn them about their gross (mis)behaviour but – bizarrely – stops short of relieving them of their badges.
Things so pear-shaped for the riotous pair when they attempt to infiltrate a million dollar racetrack heist being engineered by the decadent Lord James Mangan (Theo James) and his effeminate right hand man Birdwell (Caleb Landry Jones). The film goes into another zone when their Muslim informant Reggie X (Malcolm Barrett) leads them to Iceland, paving the way for a blood-soaked showdown with Mangan.
You’re tempted to laugh at some of the cleverer gags but stop yourself short when you realise how poor in taste they are. The pace is fast and furious and the violence almost cartoonish in its gratuitousness. While this may appear to be its safety valve, there’s nothing funny about the increasingly violent world in which we live.
Innocuous
One has to feel that films like this, innocuous and all as they appear to be by laughing up their sleeves at the devastation they wreak, have to play a part in the outpouring of such bloodletting from the multiplex to the wider metropolis.
War on Everyone represents the nadir of political incorrectness. The jokes are irreverent, racist, misogynist and any other ‘ist’ you care to mention – as the title intimates.
Which is probably why the film will be a hit at the box office. McDonagh appropriates the kind of quasi-comic excesses Quentin Tarantino has been throwing at us over the past few decades and adds some more for himself.
A demented rollercoaster ride through the quagmire of drugs, sex and chicanery, it plays itself out like a self-satisfied collage of every corrupt cop movie you’ve ever seen, and then some. Oh brave new world that has such people in it.
Poor *
