This Means War

(Movie Review)

The other day, I was in the shopping mall with a friend, and on a whim we decided to take in a movie. Neither of us had any idea what was playing, but we were in the mood to sit down in an air-conditioned theater for a couple hours and try to escape the sun, so we weren’t feeling picky.

This was the only movie showing at the local theater at that time. I had never heard of it, but I decided to take a chance. In the back of my mind I was thinking, “Well, it can’t be that bad, right? Competition for movie theater screens these days is so fierce that really bad movies don’t get a theatrical release anymore.”

Oh, was I ever wrong about that.

Within the first 5 minutes of this movie, I knew I had wasted my money.

Right from the beginning of this movie it’s painfully obvious that nobody involved in it really cared at all about the quality.

I guess this is one of those movies whose sole purpose is just to make a quick buck. Very little money is spent on screen writing or directing. If the movie is lucky, it manages to suck in a few poor saps who didn’t read the reviews, and it manages to easily recoup its low production costs.
And then it disappears into oblivion with all the other utterly forgettable movies. (5 years from now, no one will even remember this movie ever existed.)

The movie starts out immediately with incredibly cheesy dialogue that makes you think, “Did people actually get paid to write this?”

Then, without bothering to do any sort of build up or suspense at all, the entire film just breaks into this huge gun fight within the first 5 minutes.
The fighting isn’t very well choreographed, and so they try to distract from this by just doing a lot of quick edits. Which makes the whole thing very distracting and hard to follow. And (at least in my theater) the volume was cranked up way too loudly, so whenever someone got hit with a movie punch, there was this ridiculously over the top fake slap noise.

That’s just the first 5 minutes. But once you see how little thought and care is put into it, you can pretty much predict the quality of the rest of the movie. And you wouldn’t be wrong.

The genre is supposed to be a combination of action plus romantic comedy, but the comedy parts aren’t very funny. (It’s obvious no one spent a lot of time on this script.)
The action scenes are poorly choreographed and poorly edited.
And the romantic parts are pretty bad as well.

Granted I’m not generally a big fan of romance movies, so I’ll leave it to the fans of the genre to critique these parts better than I can. But since all of the characters were more plot devices than actual people, I found myself unable to care who ended up with which girl.

On the plus side:
The best thing I can say about this film is that it managed to cater very well to my short attention span. I’ve seen movies that were a lot more boring, but at least the pace of this movie kept things moving right along. Sure, each individual scene might be terrible, but thankfully none of the scenes last all that long.

Also the soundtrack is decent.

Link of the Day
Selective Memory and a Dishonest Doctrine

This Means War: Movie Review (Scripted)