“You’re not good at lying,” says FDR Foster to his best buddy, Tuck, in This Means War. He’s right: The heavily muscled, tattooed tough guy is really a teddy bear who wears his heart on his sleeve and his true feelings all over his face.
It’s that earnestness that immediately makes Lauren (Reese Witherspoon) fall for Tuck (Tom Hardy) when they’re on a first date. FDR (Chris Pine) falls for her later the same day, and the two meatheads spend the rest of the film competing for her affections — while callously lying to her and, almost as an afterthought, putting all of their lives in danger.
Life and death are in play because FDR and Tuck just happen to be highly trained, highly dangerous CIA agents — which ought to be a problem, given not only that Tuck is a terrible liar, but that the two generally aren’t very good at much of anything, apart from looking dapper and beating people up.
But never mind, because in the cartoonish universe of This Means War, general idiocy isn’t really seen as a liability. That’s a notion that applies as much to the agents themselves as it does to the blindingly unfunny script.
Their general ineptitude could have worked, if director McG had wanted to make the film a self-conscious parody — spy movie cliches in service to a romantic comedy. Indeed, in an earlier vision of the project, Seth Rogen was to star in the film; throwing him and, say, a Jonah Hill into the leads could have lent this the tone of a 21st-century Spies Like Us.