War on Everyone review – bad cop, bad cop on the trail of a plot

Pull over, punk, for Terry and Bob – renegade police who protect and serve only their self-interest. They bring gun, badge and vice on duty. Terry (Alexander Skarsgård) likes his liquor and Bob (Michael Peña) pounds the powder. Both love nothing more than a quick buck, won dirty.

Bad cop and bad cop careen around New Mexico, protecting their patch by doling out beatings to a DC comic carnival of hoodlums. The buddy film tropes line up for inspection and the Bad Lieutenant formula gets its particulars taken down. That wailing noise in the distance is Terry and Bob’s siren. Or the cries of those coming to writer-director John Michael McDonagh’s comedy hoping that the low-key class of his previous films, Calvary and The Guard, would have survived the trip to America intact.

Up to now, McDonagh’s films squeezed big ideas into small settings. Calvary’s conceit (a priest has a week to put his affairs in order before a clerical abuse victim executes him) was mighty, but its execution was subtle. The Guard, also starring Brendan Gleeson, shipped the glamorous thrill of Michael Mann’s Heat to the blustery west coast of Ireland. War on Everyone, McDonagh’s first big US adventure, sees him struggle to find an idea to fill the time. There is no shortage of candidates, though. His Albuquerque is full to busting with quirk (Quaker bank robbers, tennis-playing women in burqas, a foot-massaging gangster, a Glen Campbell-obsessed cop). Packed in, too, is a baffling jaunt to Iceland that must have made sense to the budget, if not the plot. And along with all of that? Cubic miles of dramatic dead air. It’s the same problem that McDonagh’s brother, Martin, tussled with in his similarly unsatisfying comedy thriller Seven Psychopaths: how do you make your American crime story big and exciting, when you made your reputation distilling the tropes to their essence?

War on Everyone’s plot swings on a bank robbery the cops want a cut of. It’s being done by a crew in the pay of a British lord with a deviant streak (Theo James) and his foppish sidekick (Caleb Landry Jones). Terry and Bob are happy to let the lord loose until an inevitable ante-up elevates James’s character from just plain bad to out-and-out evil. He crosses a line and Terry and Bob’s version of morality finally kicks in. Bad cop films have to pan out this way. You can’t let your heroes be truly, purely horrible. But McDonagh’s moral twist comes in way too late and much too hard. It leaves you dizzy.

The problems come to a head as Terry and Bob chase Landry-Jones’s slimy dandy through the city. As the duo race after the perp, the Fun Lovin’ Criminals’ Bear Hug blasts out of the soundtrack. The New York three-piece are an apt selection for War on Everyone. They borrowed Tarantino’s borrowed 70s aesthetic and made it cool in the nostalgia-hungry 90s. Then everyone, including McDonagh, did the same. There’s fun to be had in the shtick, but the point? It’s missing, presumed dead.