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There can’t be many who welcomed the news of McG returning to his roots to make a spy-based action comedy - although the prospect of Chris Pine and Tom Hardy as the Y chromosome’s answer to Charlie’s Angels might’ve pricked up a few female ears.
Things start off on a less-than-promising and patently McG note – a generic, clumsily shot gun-toting action set-piece atop a Hong Kong skyscraper, punctuated by lame one-liners and bursts of sub-AC/DC hard guitar. The sight of Pine and Hardy rocking sharp suits aside, you sense you’re in for a long 97 minutes.
It’s a relief, then, to discover that the opener is pure red herring. Their rooftop-bothering antics deemed too attention grabbing, our boys end up relegated to desk jobs at their CIA base, with nothing better to think about than their desultory love lives. Enter Reese Witherspoon’s unlucky-in-love Lauren whom, thanks to a convoluted web-dating subplot, the BFFs inadvertently both begin dating.
Despite what the title would have you believe, this doesn’t actually mean war so much as an onslaught of mild, rather enjoyable bromantic bickering, as Pine and Hardy make an uneasy ‘gentleman’s pact’, and proceed to compare notes on dates, engage in surveillance-based one-upmanship, and make passive-aggressive swipes at one another’s manhood.
Given co-scripter Simon Kinberg’s previous scribing gig on Sherlock Holmes , it’s not surprising how much pleasure lies in the central co-dependent friendship – although as with Holmes , it’s not so much the writing as the easy comedic chemistry between the leads that sells it.
