This Means War: Film Review

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Chalk it up to another victory for gay marriage.

No, you’re not reading a post at Maddow Blog or The Daily Kos, but after Washington State officially legalized gay marriage this week, it’s kind of hard to not see a theme emerging in the nation’s social zeitgeist (Rick Santorum’s protests notwithstanding).

Case in point: the allegedly heterosexual love triangle at the heart (or substitute any other human organ of choice) of the new Reese Witherspoon movie, This Means War. I say allegedly because though the film is supposed to be about two guys in the CIA (Chris Pine and Tom Hardy) competing for the affections of a seemingly aw-shucks nicey nice girl named Lauren (Witherspoon), the real chemistry in the movie is between Pine and Hardy.

We are told that they despise each other – not only because both want to win over Lauren, but because they also happen to be colleagues who sit literally in front of each other at the CIA and who can’t stop trying to outdo, embarrass, and one-up each other.

And yet there’s so little palpable chemistry between either Pine and Witherspoon or Witherspoon and Hardy that the only relationship you’re really interested in by the time the film is even a quarter of the way through its 97 minute running time is the one between the guys. It’s sort of a modern day i-love-him-but-hate-him bromance with a not so subtle homoerotic subtext. Both men are so in sync with each other that they no only have everything else in common in life but even come up with the same method (creepy stalker surveillance) to try and seduce Lauren. Lauren, for her part, seems perfectly happy burning up her cellular minutes plan chatting with her bestest gal pal Trish (played irreverently by Chelsea Handler). She's really not into the guys, we feel, because they're more preoccupied with each other . . . and not for the reason she's hoping.

This Means War was obviously conceived with two things in mind: one, to further perpetrate the mythology that Reese Witherspoon romantic comedies are good, and two, to make a Valentine’s Day movie that women across the land will force their boyfriends to watch with the misguided assumption that it has anything to do with romance or heterosexuality.

In the end, no one will be more pissed than Rick Santorum. Can’t those Hollywood liberals get anything right?!

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