Presumably, there are more depressing prospects in the world than watching Reese Witherspoon once again jut her chin forward and screw her face up in concentration to play yet another control freak in desperate need of a rakish man to loosen her up.
For now, though, I'm hard-pressed to think of any.
In the dire action comedy "This Means War," the often excellent, presently rudderless actress plays an unlucky-in-love product tester who simultaneously falls for two very different men - who, unbeknownst to her, happen to be best friends. Lest that's not enough contrivance for you, they both happen to be CIA agents trying to bust an international crime ring led by a European-accented bad guy, played by Til Schweiger ("Inglourious Basterds").
What's most dismaying isn't necessarily the vulgar comedy, the hyperactively edited action sequences or the sheer inanity of the script, which asks us to believe that these two men would then employ the surveillance resources of the CIA to spy on each other's dates.
It's the sight of Witherspoon straining so desperately to capture that mixture of ditziness and steeliness that made her famous in "Legally Blonde" and "Sweet Home Alabama" - even though, 10 years on, she has long since outgrown such parts. Didn't she learn her lesson when she played virtually the same character in the 2010 turkey "How Do You Know"?
Whether it's the fault of Hollywood, which rarely knows what to do with actresses in their mid-30s, or the fault of Witherspoon for not knowing when to say when, is open to debate. But the sight of her here, acting alternately "exasperated" and "turned-on" as two rascally male rabbits race around her, is a drag. Her Oscar-winning work in "Walk the Line" notwithstanding, this grown-up woman seems unable (or perhaps just unwilling) to play actual adults.
Despite being gorgeous and fabulously successful, Witherspoon's Lauren - like the comedy heroines of all contemporary comedies, especially the ones starring Katherine Heigl - is fundamentally incomplete because she doesn't have a man. She's predictably appalled when her foul-mouthed best friend Trish (Chelsea Handler, delivering less a performance than a sour talk-show monologue) signs her up for an online dating site.
Even more predictably, she agrees to give it a try, and - you guessed it - falls head over heels for the first guy she meets, a British hunk named Tuck (Tom Hardy). Still more predictably, she proceeds directly from her date with Tuck into a video store, where she bumps into Hunk No. 2, FDR (Chris Pine), whose name appears to be some sort of ironic gag in search of a punch line.
Resolutely demeaning
What's a lady with options to do? No one goes to a rom-com expecting a lecture in feminist politics, but, seriously, did "This Means War" need to be so resolutely demeaning? The guys immediately realize they are chasing after the same woman, and decide to turn it into a competition. Lauren - who has no idea the men know each other - decides to date both of them. As she and Trish endlessly debate which guy might have the bigger penis, and which might be capable of "dirty sex," the movie even flirts with affording her a measure of liberation.
But this being a PG-13 affair, one that insists its heroine remain pure, Lauren doesn't actually get to have sex until the movie's nearly over.
As the alternating dates unfold, FDR and Tuck each decide to place her under surveillance, bugging her phones and installing video cameras - one of those insanely creepy, only-in-a-rom-com plot twists that we're supposed to find charming. As we wait for the inevitable third-act twist, when the European-accented bad guy will turn up to kidnap Lauren, the movie is periodically interrupted by busy car chases and loud gun fights. The director, McG ("Charlie's Angels," "Terminator: Salvation"), has never been known for his visual elegance, but his work here is a desecration - a series of incoherently edited action sequences that seem to have been cut-and-pasted from another movie.
The three leads are all pleasant to look at, but there's no chemistry among them - how could there be in a story so cynical and stupid? All three will likely bounce back soon enough. But a movie as dreadful as "This Means War" should be a cautionary tale for all involved: When you pander to what you think the audience wants to see you do, and when you keep looking to your past to blaze a path into the future, you're almost certainly going to stumble.
