Film Review: War On Everyone

I’m a fan of John Michael McDonagh’s first two films so it was very much the strength of the director that drew me to War On Everyone.  The Guard and Calvary both boasted strong concepts, a thematic identity, well drawn central characters and bittersweet touches.  There were also highly literate and McDonagh’s fledgling voice spoke with a pitch black sense of humour.  They were both distinctively Irish; the setting as important to the story as any event onscreen.

Why, then, he’s chosen to relocate to Albuquerque for War On Everyone only adds confusion to a fairly confused film.  I didn’t dislike the film per se, I just couldn’t find a lot to like, and I tried really hard.

War On Everyone is a parody on the buddy cop genre, with trope after trope thrown in and masterfully undermined.  Some of these are overt and some are nicely subtle, so you feel like you’ve seen them before: a wealthy British villain who breeds horses; a flamboyantly-dressed androgynous henchman; wipe edits aplenty; a shooting gallery sequence; an run-ins with the chief who’s “taking heat from above…”

Whether it’s deliberate or not, McDonagh has dropped the ball on one crucial matter: his two leads are both playing the Bad Cop role.  Alexander Skarsgard and Michael Pena, fun as they are, play cops who are, respectively, terrible and slightly less terrible.  It’s like teaming Riggs with Riggs.  While admittedly this would prevent the horrible softening of his character that takes place after the first Lethal Weapon, but without Murtaugh’s grounding influence there is no character dynamic.  The leads are both good and do what they can to bounce off each other but when they’re both criminals, with approving families, much of the dramatic tension is gone.

The other issue with the film is really no fault of its own, but the timing isn’t great.  Recent cinematic history has given us some cracking examples of parodies and spoofs on the buddy cop genre, all of which were funnier and more keenly observed than War On Everyone.  The wonderful Hot Fuzz set the bar as high as it’s likely to go, taking every genre convention you’re likely to see in an L.A.-set blockbuster and transplanting them to rural England.  The extremely knowing 21 Jump Street and self aware sequel 22 Jump Street were completely stupid but squeezed the genre for every laugh. My personal highlight: the homoerotic undertones of the buddy genre are revealed in a riff on the lobster scene from Annie Hall.  McDonagh’s own debut The Guard, billed by one reviewer as “Lethal Weapon meets Father Ted”, offered its own spin on buddy cops and did a really good job of it, too.  His desire to revisit the same turf again is strange to say the least.  The Albuquerque setting, too, is strange; it feels like even a cursory nod to Breaking Bad was needed in order to secure the funding…

McDonagh’s voice, so prominent in his first two films, is at once both muted and overwhelming here.  The Guard and Calvary focused on two men, both flawed authority figures, and their importance within the community; they are two films which spiral towards death.  While it’s admirable that War On Everyone deliberately does the exact opposite, it’s also not as clear what McDonagh’s getting at.  Just telling a story about two corrupt cops shaking down criminals for money before eventually discovering a conscience simply isn’t enough after what he’s done before. 

His style of dialogue doesn’t quite work here either.  Much like Kevin Smith, whose swathes of dialogue about Star Wars and weed went from fresh to tedious within about two films, McDonagh’s tendency towards philosophical ramblings is tiresome.  There were a few eye-rolling moments in his previous films: dialogue about Dostoefsky and Moby Dick from characters it didn’t really fit, did seem a little contrived. These were forgivable in the context of better films with stronger thematic content but War On Everyone often comes off as trying too hard to be clever: in one scene, Steven Soderbergh is described as “an auteur” rather than a director; a character discusses Pythagoras’ ideas about death; the climactic stand off is punctuated by a philosophical joke/riddle; and there’s a half-heartedly running debate over the origin of a quote.  None of this is really necessary: it adds little, and seldom fits the characters.  McDonagh should also realise that just putting an Irish character in a place you wouldn’t necessarily expect to see one doesn’t make him funny.  The net effect is that a decent film is speckled with pretention.

War On Everyone, however, is a very funny film.  There are some genuinely great moments and as a genre parody, the plot points are all well executed, your expectations both met and undermined in quite a satisfying way.  It’s such a shame that for his American debut, McDonagh has travelled so far from his roots while trying too hard to exert his identity, to the point where it feels forced.  A great cast tries really hard but unfortunately they’re on the losing side of this war.