War on Everyone review — the biggest casualties in this conflict are the audience
War on Everyone is the latest film from John Michael McDonagh (The Guard, Calvary), the brother of In Bruges director Martin. Like his brother he struggles when swapping Europe for America. This buddy cop movie imbued with a seventies vibe is devoid of both a coherent plot and a sense of humour.
When it comes to the latter, this film tries too hard by punching down to get cheap laughs, picking on an array of marginalised groups and people for giggles. At times during the film, listening to other viewers erupting in large belly laughs, I felt more like I was attending a Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown show than the latest film from the critically-acclaimed director. It was the kind of humour that would have been commonplace just a decade ago but now seems alien in more enlightened times. It was typified when Malcolm Barrett’s character was revealed to be dating a transgender woman in Iceland, and the two leads, Michael Peña and Alexander Skarsgård, joked about whether that meant he was gay now, once they had left his place.
War on Everyone does suffer for being released in the same year as the far superior, and much funnier, The Nice Guys — but even if this weren’t the case, the plot is messy, its characters two-dimensional, and its main baddie, played by Theo James, dull and ineffective.
It seems apt that Iceland featured within this film, for if War on Everyone was compared to any real-life conflicts it would be to the Cod Wars fought between Britain and the small Nordic nation between the ’50s and ’70s. Although the amount of fish Britain got from Iceland was substantial, it didn’t make up for the military cost of the conflict or the international mockery that followed.
Just like the Cod Wars, War on Everyone is ultimately pointless.
