“It starts and ends with the script,” says one lowlife to another in War On Everyone, as they disapprovingly watch a low-grade porn flick. “If you ain’t got a good script, you ain’t got shit.” Fortunately, the person who wrote and directed this coal-dark crime comedy is John Michael McDonagh, the Irish auteur behind The Guard and Calvary. Both of those films are mordantly funny, unpredictable and set on the rain-moistened Emerald Isle. With his third feature, he has shifted locales to sun-baked New Mexico; but thankfully McDonagh’s delightful weirdness remains intact.
War On Everyone is a spin on maybe the most hackneyed genre of them all, the buddy-cop movie. The customary tropes are all in place: Terry and Bob ride around in their ice-blue Monte Carlo coupe bickering and stopping for cheeseburgers, reporting in sporadically to their grouchy superior (Paul Reiser). There’s a foot chase originating in a strip club and soundtracked by a Fun Lovin’ Criminals track, while another scene riffs on Beverly Hills Cop. But for every moment that seems derivative, there’s a winningly absurd scenario or inspired touch. Terry and Bob, whose names may or may not be a tribute to The Likely Lads, are introduced in hot pursuit of a mime. (“I’ve always wondered… if you hit a mime, does he make a sound?” ponders Terry, shortly before finding out.) There’s also a silly running joke involving our heroes’ ongoing feud with a SWAT team.
The bad-to-the-bones lead duo are joyously over-the-top.
The bad-to-the-bones lead duo are joyously over-the-top: Terry, who has thrush and swigs bottles of beer at breakfast, is a lawman so excessively immoral he even outdoes Chief Wiggum from the famous ‘Bad Cops’ skit in The Simpsons, while Bob makes for a fine foil as the family-man partner who’s far from squeaky-clean himself. The stars are clearly having fun, too — this is redemption for Skarsgård after his bland-Tarzan misstep this summer. The villains they’re up against, meanwhile, are intentionally a lot less funny, but memorably peculiar. Theo James, best known for his role in the Divergent series, comes close to stealing the whole show as louche, Homer-literate aristocrat-scumbag James Mangan, not least because he dominates the best shot of the movie as a Steadicam prowls with him through his debauched mansion. Only a late reveal involving him is misjudged, so bleak that it threatens to tip over the whole movie.
There are other flaws: some scenes aren’t nearly as funny as they think they are (an exchange about Steven Soderbergh’s Out Of Sight starts and ends without scoring a laugh) and the plot itself fails to build up much in the way of suspense. But McDonagh — cutting with old-school line-wipes, cranking up the Glen Campbell — is clearly having a blast. The feeling’s contagious.
