It's a hit-and-miss affair as CIA agents/BFFs Chris Pine and Tom Hardy launch highly targeted competing covert love-ops in This Means War, both aiming for the heart of a consumer products tester played by Reese Witherspoon. Smart, blonde, beautiful but unable to get a guy, Witherspoon's Lauren Scott is as perky and perfect as she seems, but this lovely is not what gives the movie its kick.
So if you are in the mood for action, there is a whole lot of it here. If you're in the mood for love, of the swooning, weak-in-the knees sort, there's not so much. But this is war after all, a bromance, not a romance, muscle, not mush. The relationship that truly sizzles — from the sentiment to the satire — is the one between FDR (Pine) and Tuck (Hardy), with Pine and Hardy pulling off one of the better bromances in recent memory.
It's not as if director McG has gone soft. He has just injected a razzle-dazzle romance into a high-octane, high-tech action flick in which guns and hearts are pretty much blazing 24/7.
The sparks begin when Lauren's best friend Trish, a potty-mouthed mum played by Chelsea Handler decides to take Lauren's love life into her own hands, posting a racy page on a dating site. A few continents away, Tuck and FDR are on assignment — a James Bond-styled operation that lands them in a lux penthouse party looking for a bad guy named Heinrich (Til Schweiger) and involves a great deal of roof-top hanging out and hair-raising derring-do.
Back home in LA, and grounded for all the ways the Heinrich affair went wrong, single-dad Tuck decides to try finding a soul mate online. Lauren's profile is discovered and a date is set with FDR stationed nearby in case an emergency extraction is necessary. A chance encounter changes the plan, and the competition for Lauren that will drive the rest of the film is set in motion.
Hardy and Pine are the heart of the film — proving to be excellent opposing sides of the same coin. Both balance their characters' cynicism with a certain sweetness, their chemistry fairly crackling, electrifying the screen almost any time they're sharing it, whether taking down a bad guy or squabbling about who is more lovable (it's a toss-up).
Though the role doesn't quite get Witherspoon back where she belongs, Lauren has more of the kind of sweet sass that first made the actress into such a cinematic sweetheart. As Lauren, she's mostly rock 'n' roll eye candy — a maniac behind the wheel and not so demure in bed either — but there are occasional flashes of some of the better past lives she's had.
