What is it good for? Not a fat lot

I didn’t know much about This Means War beforehand, beyond the fact it has Tom Hardy and Chris Pine as two spies fighting for the affections of Reese Witherspoon (understandably so tbf). So when, after a brain-numbing 90 minutes, the dread words “Directed by McG” appeared as the credits rolled, this explained an awful lot.

In fairness to our preposterously-pseudonymed friend, the overriding impression here is of a film that’s been focus-grouped to death, with every last drop of originality wrung out of each ploddingly obvious scene, which isn’t all his fault. The horrible, hyperactive cartoon aesthetic though most definitely is.

Why on earth do you need so many jump cuts, especially in scenes which are basically two blokes chatting? Why are some angles randomly shot on grainy film? Why does everything feel like it was shot by an ADD afflicted five year-old?

Funnily enough, the camera tends to sit still during scenes with Witherspoon and Chelsea Handler, playing the standard romcom buddy role. But hey, maybe that’s unfair and like me it was transfixed by Handler’s enormous botox-pout.

Her character does deliver the majority of the jokes in this film, although how well is open to debate. Otherwise you’ll have to rely on the occasional visual gag (such as Hardy copping an inadvertent paintball shot to the groinal area) and some very lukewarm bromantic banter for your comedic sustenance.

The characterization is so wafer-thin though that it’s impossible to care. We know Hardy is the “nice” one because he has a cute young son, meanwhile I assume Pine’s wiseass character is meant to be endearing so it’s unfortunate that everything he says and does (boasting, bullshitting, not to mention stalking aplenty) marks him out as a total douche. Even Witherspoon struggles to achieve her usual level of aimiability, so little does she have to work with.

The romcom stuff is broken up with intermittent and tediously violent action scenes, because you know, these guys are spies after all. All this is presumably meant to appeal to a large cross-section of the public, though one suspects it will end up alienating people from all sides.

Given the above, it’s no surprise when [spoiler alert~!] the boorish, lunkheaded Pine ends up with the girl. He’s precisely what you would imagine the real-life McG to be, or at least what he would like himself to be, which is yet another reason why such a man should never be let loose with a big budget and full-length running time. He’s practically a danger to society.

If This Means War is a proper nightmarish Vietnam of a movie, then The War on Drugs' gig on Tuesday night in Camden felt more like the Hundred Years War. Again I went into this pretty much cold, but had perhaps naively presumed that it was going to be a song-based affair, when what we actually got was a lot of noodly noise.

When the vocals did kick in they were pretty interesting, Adam Granduciel’s enunciating reminiscent of Dylan at times albeit at a higher pitch (and in tune, obviously). And they can definitely play - none of it was unpleasant apart perhaps from playing of one droney note for what felt like twenty minutes, and there was some toe-tapping fun to be had.

But the overall sound was too sludgy to leave a lasting impression, with nothing visually going on to compensate. Audience interaction was limited to bringing someone onstage to play guest guitar on one track (whether or not he was a plant was rather moot).

If this was War, then on balance I’m going to have to sign up as a conscientious objector.