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75As is true in most buddy pictures, the real love in This Means War is between FDR and Tuck. Pine and Hardy are an odd choice as Men Who Bond. Pine behaves like a player on Entourage; Hardy broods as if he thinks dating is torture. But as a result, they're kind of cute in an itchy and scratchy way, bumping shoulders in a pantomime of what men do in love and war.
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63The film's focus on the contest between the two agents does throw the film off-balance.
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63This Means War is not funny enough to succeed as a comedy. It's not emotionally deft enough to succeed as a romance. And it's not exciting enough to succeed as an action film. It's a high-energy, fast-paced explosion of moments that can be edited together to make a compelling trailer.
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60Smart, funny and really quite hot, this is worth a look no matter what you think of "Charlie's Angels."
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60A dating fantasy for girls and an action bromance for guys, This Means War wins the Valentine date crowd in swoops and strokes, but does it lead to swoons? Not really.
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58At least This Means War is an equal opportunity misfire, with as much appeal for men as women, compared to a one-sided weeper like "The Vow."
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50The best you can say about This Means War is that it would make a good date movie for couples in the witness protection program.
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50This Means War is a Valentine's date dud: Think wilted roses, squashed chocolates and flat champagne.
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50Silly action sequences grow tedious and rarely blend with the wannabe madcap comedy.
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50Perfectly acceptable watched on the back of an airline seat or at home while you're doing housework.
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50Even by the standards of light entertainment, This Means War is meaningless.
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50Pine, who expertly approximated William Shatner in the Star Trek reboot, seems to have picked up some of the actor's air of self-serious buffoonery, and it suits him well; as Witherspoon's best pal, late-night TV comedian Chelsea Handler holds down what might be called the Nora Ephron part, dispensing an endless stream of bawdy man jokes.
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50Individually they are all good here, though Hardy's skills don't necessarily translate that well to romantic comedy -- which could have been used to good effect, but McG doesn't have the touch to pull that off.
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50If you can get past the gross invasion of privacy issues that would exist if this were real life and not just a frothy confection, what you have is some bittersweet fun peppered by bursts of sharp patter, the best between the boys.
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50This Means War seems so concerned with being the best product, it doesn't even know how to be good trash.
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50The gut-whomping, high-concept romantic thriller This Means War is not a distinguished addition to director McG's oeuvre.
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40Technically, movies don't give off a scent, but This Means War is so smarmy that it seems to reek of cheap cologne.
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Feb 16, 201240Bromance or romance, This Means War feels like something scrawled by enterprising teenagers who developed their concepts of love and espionage from films and TV shows they caught over a few weekends of basic cable surfing.
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40But Pine playing 1960s-era Shatner – sometimes subtly, sometimes not? That's a terrific gag. Really, it is. Totally inspired. It's just not enough to save this otherwise cookie-cutter bromantic comedy from being anything other than what it is: an inoffensive yawn.
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40The cocky presumption of charm that isn't actually there is precisely the problem with action-comedy This Means War.
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Feb 10, 201240This screwball premise lives or dies by the chemistry between Pine and Hardy, who are too busy trying to out-appeal one another to make the buddy dynamic click.
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38As this sloppy, scattered, utterly synthetic piece of Hollywood widgetry unspools, it becomes increasingly clear that the romantic tension at play exists mostly between the men in question.
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38A trio of appealing actors is trapped in an action-spiked romcom death-sentenced by a lack of humor, heart and a coherent reason for being.
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38If there's anything I hate more than a stupid action comedy, it's an incompetent stupid action comedy. It's not so bad it's good. It's so bad it's nothing else but bad.
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30Reese Witherspoon is a woman, aged thirty-five, with a bundle of grownup roles behind her. Yet in order to retain her slot in romantic comedy, it appears, she must reverse into her teens. What makes the transition yet more depressing is the memory of Tracy Flick. [27 Feb. 2012, p.86]
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25The action, which bookends the movie, is atrocious, defying all laws of gravity and physics and machine gun-edited into incomprehensible lunacy.
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25It's got both a soap opera plotline and a Chuck Norris-load of taxpayer-financed gadgets and gear. It also has Reese Witherspoon in another terrible part.
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25Pure, witless discombobulation.
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25Given the creepiest rom-com premise this side of "Addicted To Love" - which at least had the wisdom to reflect on its camera-obscura voyeurism - director McG tries to turn This Means War into a cool pop confection along the lines of his Charlie's Angels movies. But pouring on the douchey hipness and charm only makes things worse.
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20Charmless and histrionic, this mean-spirited movie takes place in the toyscape of McG (Charlie's Angels), a monomonikered director who makes Michael Bay seem thoughtful.
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20"War" is depressingly mean-spirited.
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10This perfectly dreadful romantic action comedy manages to embarrass its three eminently attractive leading players in every scene, making this an automatic candidate for whatever raspberries or golden turkeys or other dubious awards may be given in future for the films of 2012.
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0With the material they're given, they mostly just seem foolish for showing up to the movie to begin with. Audiences would do well to avoid the same mistake.
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0An ugly, misguided exercise.
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0Nearly totally laugh-, chemistry- and coherence-free, this fiasco from the director of "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle'' has a script whose sensible parts would fit on a napkin with enough room left over for the Gettysburg Address.
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0The result is 98 minutes of moronic stupidity already being labeled on the Internet as "the worst movie of the year."