War on Everyone (2016) - Film Review

Review:

*Originally written September 19th, 2016*

"War on taste"

War on Everyone is pathetic, vulgar, tasteless garbage that tries so hard to offend it's childish. Everything about this film is unlikable. This film was purely written to hate and offend everyone. If you're a man, woman, child, of a foreign ethnicity, transgender, gay, straight, overweight or just a human being. War on Everyone tries its very hardest to include a joke that offends you.

Directed by John Michael McDonagh (The Guard and Calvary. Two much better films), War on Everyone tells the incoherent story of two corrupt cops in New Mexico played by Michael Pena and Alexander Skarsgard. They get involved in a robbery where $1 million goes missing and they blackmail, beat and abuse their power in order to find the missing money. At least I think that was the story? The writing is so messy and scattershot that it made 2013's Filth look easy to follow.

Where War on Everyone easily fails the most is with its writing. Every line of dialogue is either an offensive insult or swearing. It was merciless to sit through. There's not a single thing to grasp onto to make this worth watching. Everything and everyone was just horrible. This is a film where we're meant to root for our two leads who are both racist, alcoholic, drug users all while on duty. There's no coherent story to follow either, it seemed to be a never ending montage of scenes where horrible characters do and say horrible things with no charm, heart or wit.

In a poor attempt to contrast with the leads, they make the cross-dressing villains of the film murderous paedophiles in what I can only assume is an attempt to get us on our "protagonists" side. These half thought out and misguided revelations are only discovered in the last 20 minutes, by then it was far too late to care what happens.

The few positives this film has is in terms of its music choices and the odd bit of visual flourish. The films closes to The Clash's 'I Fought the Law' which was nice, as I like that song, so I at least got to hear that. While most of the film and action is visually flat, there are one or two scenes where some actually unique direction comes into play. Also, for a film set in New Mexico, they really wasted some chances for beautifully cinematography. Look at the TV show Breaking Bad, if you want an example of how beautiful New Mexico can be.

There really is nothing to like about War on Everyone aside from the odd visually interesting shot. There is no chemistry between the leads,which is appalling considering this is a buddy-cop film, it's just pure trash. The worst and most vile buddy-cop film since Bad Boys 2. Hell, this might even be worse than Bad Boys 2. Yeah. It's that's bad.

2/10 Dans

War on Everyone is out now on Blu-ray and DVD in the UK

Watch the trailer below:

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