John Michael McDonagh’s War on Everyone: A Hilarious Buddy Cop Comedy Begging for a Franchise
Finally, the kind of role Michael Peña deserves.
Imagine if
Quentin Tarantino directed
Starsky and Hutch and didn't mess it up with his whole malignant misanthropic, misogynistic look-at-me thing. The result would be
John Michael McDonagh's snort-milk-out-your-nose-funny buddy cop comedy
War on Everyone, premiering at the 66th Berlin Film Festival.
Michael Peña and
Alexander Skarsgard play Bob and Terry, co-dependent corrupt Albuquerque pigs snorting and shooting their way to tumble a supercilious English Lord (Divergent's posh Theo James) into horseracing, heists, and kiddy porn.
McDonagh (
The Guard, Calvary), like his brother Martin (
In Bruges), has a virtuosic way with dialogue, interlacing philosophical musings with ridiculous questions like "if you hit a mime does he make a sound?" One of the movie's greatest pleasures is that it gives Peña, an actor often forced by Hollywood to play roles beneath his skill set (exception: his cop bromance
End of Watch, opposite Jake Gyllenhaal), long riffs of dialogue that he spins out like a Howard Hawks cockeyed hero. Finally, he gets to play the smartest guy in the room, not the Hispanic sidekick.
And then there's Skarsgard, pausing in that career moment before he goes full on studio Tarzan. No one can fault a critic for pausing to salivate over the True Blood star, as he rolls out of bed with his new squeeze (the alluring Tessa Thompson), sweat slicked and gorgeous, in nothing more than a tiny pair of mustard-colored briefs. Here is an actor who recently made a horny boy-man sleeping with an under-aged teen in The Diary of a Teenage Girl oddly appealing if not quite sympathetic. In War on Everyone, Skarsgard plays a bruised beauty with a tarnished badge. Terry's life plays out to a soundtrack of Glen Campbell songs, underscoring the achy twangy yearning white boy at his core. Terry's hard-drinking, hard-punching policeman is a Rhinestone Cowboy, a Wichita Lineman. It’s a rueful comedic performance that he pounds out like pavement into something deeper and darker and more touching than your average buddy cop.
The opening sequences of
War on Everyone are so furiously fast and funny it's nearly unimaginable that McDonagh can sustain the pace. And yet he does. When the script eases up on the rapid-fire quips, seguing into hilarious music cues (all that Campbell!) and slapstick violence, it brings its best game. Because these flawed but funny characters have dimension, depth, deep desires and, damn it, cry out for a franchise.
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/02/war-on-everyone-review
Steering into the frame to the sound of ’70s rock music while giving chase in their muscle car to a fully-costumed, on-foot mime, the impeccably dressed, utterly corrupt police duo of Bob Bolaño (
Michael Peña) and Terry Monroe (
Alexander Skarsgård) initially appear to be running full-speed towards an even wackier version of the
Starsky & Hutch movie we got in 2004. Audiences familiar with the work of director
John Michael McDonagh (
The Guard,
Calvary), however, will know something else must be in store with
War on Everyone, even if McDonagh himself has made no mystery of the slightly broader canvas he’s working on this time around...
Seemingly intent on testing how black your humor can get while not breaking the film’s more playful and witty throughline, McDonagh goes to some new extremes when compared with his first two Irish-set outings. The problem with
War on Everyone is that his signature blend of absurdist characterization, purposefully random bits of intellectualism, and sudden bursts of violence were so effective in, for instance,
Calvary’s more pensive milieu, for those were allowed to stand out and color the narrative. Relocating this story to the States, the director is not unintentionally turning up the volume and making his western fascination a bit too literal to still be able to sustain his distinctive tones. If
Calvary was more of a “war on one,” as poor Brendan Gleeson could not find a good soul in town to save his life (literally), this here is a furious free-for-all you don’t remember the start of and can’t imagine an end to.
The flipside of that coin is that McDonagh’s directorial style evolves in the same direction, giving way to more pronounced and expressionistic visuals. With its bright palette, stark color contrasts, and lopsided camera angles, this is a deliciously abstract portrait of Albuquerque in which every wallpaper, nightclub light, and car-wash spin makes for evocative, retro-style imagery. And it’s not all in service of the verbal and physical mayhem, either — Skarsgård’s character in particular is granted a series of more reflexive segments, thanks to his improbably profound involvement with
Tessa Thompson’s Jackie.
Permanently hunched forward and mostly unable to walk in a straight line, Skarsgård’s Terry looks like a giant threatening to stomp on a village. His admiration for Bob’s more nuanced skill set and verbal dexterity is endearing, and it nicely assists Peña’s performance. An actor of extraordinary intelligence and perceptiveness, the
Ant-Man co-star offers a re-working of his similar but strictly dramatic
End of Watch role, polishing it off with his underused gift for comedy — the man would make just about any character likeable, and McDonagh’s artificially edgy, anti-heroic constructs are not even a challenge in that regard.
A noticeable step down from the highs of
The Guard and
Calvary,
War on Everyone is still only McDonagh’s third effort and nonetheless a bold, lively endeavour. Much like Terry, it feels like muscle-flexing that inadvertently knocks down stuff and could use some restraint.
http://thefilmstage.com/reviews/berlin-review-war-on-everyone/
The flashes from the photographers in the beginning was crazy. If it was me up there, they would be lucky to get one picture with my eyes open. And from the Q&A we have our WOE Skars word of the day: Tonally. 
