Meet Bob and Terry, the very unlikeable lads
JOHN Michael McDonagh’s last film was 2014’s Calvary, a terrific, darkly funny thriller set in an Irish village less Ballykissangel than Ballykissdevil.
Before that, he also wrote and directed The Guard, also set in Ireland and also full of the black stuff, which in McDonagh’s world is comedy.
So I had mighty expectations for War On everyone, his third feature. It was mildly disconcerting to hear that he’d crossed the Atlantic to make it, and more troubling still to find that it was all about a pair of maverick cop buddies, probably the least original of all modern movie premises. But I still expected to love it.
I didn’t. I hated it. Shot through with screamingly self-conscious quirkiness, it is also grotesquely violent, with dialogue that strains painfully hard to evoke Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
Its only virtue is a cracking soundtrack, certainly if you like Glen Campbell. But who wants to see a rhinestone cowboy riddled with bullets?
Michael Pena and Alexander Skarsgard play Bob and Terry, which might be another nod of homage, this time to The Likely Lads of blessed memory.
Not that there’s anything lovable about this pair. They are irredeemably corrupt Albuquerque cops — one listless, the other brainless. Still, they at least prefer to nail than befriend villains, in this case the seedy manager of a strip club (Caleb Landry Jones) and his aristocratic english boss (Theo James).
McDonagh tries to give his film a vague Seventies vibe, with references to The French Connection and Starsky And Hutch. Fair enough. But he also tosses in a host of disconnected images, such as a pair of women in full burkas playing tennis, that add nothing except a sense of desperation.
This film needs more than a dash of surrealism to save it. A different premise and a new script might help, for starters.