War on Everyone

John Michael McDonagh’s third film as writer/director attempts to mash up the concerns of his first two films, The Guard and Calvary, with intermittent success.

Terry Monroe (Alexander Skarsgard) is rarely sober. His work buddy Bob Bolano (Michael Pena) is rarely polite. But that doesn’t matter because they literally have a get out of jail free card, they’re cops. But they won’t be cops for much longer if Lt. Stanton (Paul Reiser) doesn’t see them rein in the lunacy. Dialling down the public drunkenness and excessive force is a huge ask when Terry and Bob stumble, via their CI Reggie (Malcolm Barrett), onto a complicated heist. Dazzled by the prospect of acquiring riches; and on Terry’s part, Jackie (Tessa Thompson), a moll at a loose end; the dirty duo unwittingly put themselves in the bad books with an unlikely mastermind after one beating a suspect mercilessly too far. Lord James Mangan (Theo James) is the nemesis fate has set up for these cheerfully corrupt detectives.

War on Everyone does not live up to the high expectations held for it as while it features any number of hilarious lines and ideas it never truly gels. It doesn’t rattle along like an absurdist procedural with philosophical tangents, but it isn’t an episodic tale in service of a larger philosophical meditation either, so it falls between the two stools of The Guard and Calvary. Lorne Balfe’s score is heroically in thrall to 1970s brass, funk and bombast, while Terry’s preoccupation with Glen Campbell finds full tuneful fulfilment on the soundtrack. The New Mexico locations are strikingly captured by Oren Moverman’s regular cinematographer Bobby Bukowski, a highlight being a distant tracking shot capturing Skarsgard chasing a perp. And in a delirious scripting touch Terry’s constant outrageous drinking is shown wreaking havoc on his memory and his ability to work.

War on Everyone is a memorable film, not a great one, but a patchwork that uses to the full its licence to offend is preferable to any cookie-cutter banality.

3.5/5

Life After Beth

Dane DeHaan had never made a comedy before this film. I’m not sure he still hasn’t made a comedy after starring in Life After Beth.

Zach Orfman (DeHaan) is inconsolable with grief after his girlfriend Beth Slocum (Aubrey Plaza) dies from a snakebite while on a solo hike in the hills. Despite the best efforts of his abrasive security guard brother Kyle (Matthew Gray Gubler), and his helicopter parents Judy (Cheryl Hines) and Noah (Paul Reiser), nothing can shake him out of his gloom. Instead he spends his time with Beth’s parents, playing chess and smoking weed with Maury (John C Reilly), and going thru Beth’s clothes with Geenie (Molly Shannon). So far so Moonlight Mile. But when the Slocums’ Haitian maid Pearline (Eva La Dare) flees town, it’s not long before a horde of zombies appears, heralded by a returned Beth – who has no memory of dying, and is now super-strong, insanely jealous of Zach’s reappeared childhood friend Erica (Anna Kendrick), and increasingly hungry…

Warm Bodies approached the conundrum of how you make a romantic comedy with zombies by making the zombies not zombies. Life After Beth keeps the zombies as zombies and instead ditches the romantic comedy aspect. Which can’t be intentional, can it? There are so many good actors onboard that you feel something has gone disastrously wrong. Reiser is more likeable than I’ve ever seen him, and Gubler is fantastically obnoxious. But the lead performances don’t match them. Plaza presumably signed on for eating people and blowing up a lifeguard post, but, while she has fun with the physical shtick, the role mutes her comedic grouchiness. DeHaan’s everyman is ill-served by the puzzling script. What should be deadpan just turns out blank. Reacting blankly to absurd situations does not by itself provide comedy, there does need to be jokes in addition.

Writer/director Jeff Baena co-wrote I Heart Huckabees which makes it all the more baffling what the hell went wrong because he’s not a man short of comedic invention. Technically everyone is at the top of their game. Jay Hunter, who was the DP for Joss Whedon’s crisply monochrome Much Ado About Nothing, bathes this gated community in a sunlight wonderfully inapt for a zombie horror; again displaying flair on a shoestring. Kudos must also go to the casting directors (Nicole Daniels and Courtney Sheinin) who realised that with the right haircut DeHaan and Gubler are perfect as brothers. But technical competence and solid acting can only get you so far. By the end when a gratuitously naked female zombie appears you’re not sure if it’s a ham-fisted nod to Re-Animator, or a stunt to arouse the audience from its slumber.

Life After Beth is a zom-rom-com that’s played so straight that it ends up a romantic drama about a bad break-up and an unstable ex-girlfriend; now with added zombies.

1/5