This Means War

Indian Express Ratings:*

CIA just doesn’t make war,it also makes “love”. With all the tracking,bugging devices,all the smart agents,all the watching screens at its disposal,it helps two of its “best officers” be the men that the woman whom they both like wants them to be,all the way to the bedroom.

Along the way,the two agents also fight off,for some reason,a guy called Heinrich,who puts great import on a torn piece of a Saville Row suit. The woman the agents are watching is an executive at ‘Smart Consumers Inc’. The guy they should be watching but aren’t poses a more direct,physical threat.

However,Tuck (Hardy) and FDR (Pine) don’t let a little thing called conscience get in their way as they go about wooing Lauren (Witherspoon). Yep,FDR is what the second guy is called,no eyebrows raised. Director ‘McG’ perhaps wanted an own private chuckle.

In the “gentleman’s bet” between Tuck and FDR,it is decided that they would let the woman take the final call and they woulddo “what’s best for her”. Without telling Lauren,of course,about all the appendages they have at their disposal to win her affections apart from blue eyes and fulsome lips.

The film doesn’t have just the “successful woman looking for a guy” routine,it also has her with a happily married,raucously horny friend who makes you pity all those children she is raising. Not to mention the fat husband she has “sweaty sex with every Wednesday”,eating cheetos,as the film helpfully shows.

Witherspoon has to just turn up looking pretty in various frames,being to her shock in the happy situation of a woman being wooed assiduously by two very different men with very different tastes. That she is also being spied upon is better left untold.

This means love,does it? Oops,forgot. “This means war”.

shalini.langer@expressindia.com