SXSW ’16 REVIEW

SXSW ’16 Review: ‘WAR ON EVERYONE’

Name: War on Everyone review
Item: War on Everyone
Rating: 3.3
Author: Matt Oakes

By Matt Oakes · March 14, 2016

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John Michael McDonagh stepped out from the shadows of filmmaker young brother Martin McDonagh, who’s crafted such cult modern classics as In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, in 2011 when he debuted The Guard. That film went on to mild box office success (overseas) and general critical adoration, though I’ll admit the deadpan acidic humor never quite reached me the way that it had so many others. McDonagh’s latest, and his first film set on American soil, is War On Everyone and represents a clear, though offbeat, progression of the director’s interests. Within, he declares war on traditional narrative constructs of law and lawless, cops and robbers, good and evil, giving a grand total of zero fucks along the way.

A construct of pissy noir and sharp satirical tongues, the English/Irish director’s third feature bears the misanthropic, angry comedic styles of The Guard and the sky is falling narrative entropy of Calgary without the sharp gravitas omnipresent in that later standout feature (Of McDonagh’s building resume, that film truly struck a chord with me.) About a priest (Brendan Neeson) targeted not for his sexual indiscretions but lack thereof, Calgary was rooted in drama with aggressive splashes of jet black comedy. War On Everyone flips the equation, giving itself over to blanket absurdity and satirical sheen, spanking any erupting drama on its rear before it’s had a chance to set in.

Alexander Skarsgård is Terry Monroe, a hard-drinking New Mexico beat cop and partner to Bob Bolaño (Michael Peña). Monroe and Bolaño are as corrupt as they come, barely sober enough to make it through the day and much more dedicated to lining their own pockets than serving the people or upholding the law. They wield their badges as weapons, leaning on local smalltime criminals and often making off with new flatscreen TV’s or a sack of grade-A cocaines, which they snort in public restrooms, absconding from their law-enforcing brethren .

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Their unscrupulous pairing makes for explosive comedy of the darkest grade and from motifs of societal normative apathy to repeated violent visual gags – i.e. Terry plowing his car into perps, parked cars or buildings – these two reject the smallest inkling of good conscience. Until they don’t. Like all great misanthropic anti-heroes, they rise to the occasion to protect those who cannot protect themselves when the hour strikes.

When an unsavory foreign “businessman” (Theo James) crops up on their radar, the opportunistic officers try to give him the squeeze, a mistake that escalates until the pair accidentally end up at war with a powerful British family. James makes for a bland Euro baddie of the scenery-smacking and smack-injecting variety, lacking the chops to make a role like this ironic. Flanked by strip club owner and porno video producer Birdwell (Caleb Landry Jones in maybe his most grating performance yet in a career quickly becoming full of them), McDonagh provides proficient fodder for our American pent-up aggression and is more than happy to dispense his own brand of twisted justice on the scene too.

War On Everyone strives for a kind of bitter, pissy modern-day noir. It’s a cop movies that hates cops; a frothing absurdist comedy wagging its middle finger to and fro. That the fog of war can be somewhat impenetrable is suiting for the territory and Terry and Bob make for good companions through this moral-less wasteland. All undercut by biting chemistry between a fittingly crass Peña and totally unhinged Skarsgård , both of whom are mightily convincing at not giving a fuck.

CONCLUSION: John Michael McDonagh’s brassy ‘War on Everyone’ is a nonstop assault on social conscience; a normatively apathetic riot, fastened by Alexander Skarsgård and Michael Peña’s piss-in-the-wind ennui, that is as darkly comic as it is frequently uneven.