'This Means War': A covert battle for Reese's pieces

It's hard to think outside the box -- the box being television -- when you've made hundreds of millions of dollars inside it.

That is the financial subtext of today's homily and of director McG's approach to making movies like "This Means War," a romcom hybrid starring Chris Pine and Tom Hardy. Mr. Pine plays Franklin Delano Roosevelt Foster -- naturally aka FDR -- a "cruise ship captain." Mr. Hardy plays Tuck, a "travel agent."

In fact, they are covert CIA agents dispatched to thwart and apprehend vicious international criminals. FDR is a lovable-rogue Yankee ladies man. Tuck is a sensitive, recently divorced Brit, unable to plunge back into the dating pool. They are polar as well as bipolar opposites.

When in doubt (or on the rebound), go online. Tuck does so and, soon enough, the best buds become bitter rivals for legally blond Lauren (Reese Witherspoon), a consumer product tester-evaluator. Their competitive alpha-male instincts kick into overdrive: two designing men, each desperately vying for some of Reese's pieces.

In movieland, as we know, you've got your action films and your romantic comedies. The idea here is to meld a surefire combo of the two, fine-tuning the chick-flick formula with three -- exactly three, count 'em -- absurdly violent shoot-'em-up James Bondian sequences to keep the guys interested, or at least awake. The cinematic equivalent of a snooze button on an alarm clock, those scenes are located at the beginning, middle and end.

The mayhem is nothing if not symmetrical, as well as incomprehensible. It involves some cardboard Russian villains in some sort of revenge conspiracy that calls for them to parachute from atop a skyscraper in Hong Kong and then show up later in Los Angeles for rounds two and three.

Meanwhile, for the bulk of the time, Mr. Pine and Mr. Hardy are free to employ all the available state-of-the-art CIA surveillance techniques to monitor and sabotage each other's dates with Ms. Witherspoon. They're like George Burns watching Gracie and Blanche's shenanigans on that supernatural TV set he somehow had.

For a concoction like this to work, everything depends on the personalities of the stars -- separately and collegially. Ms. Witherspoon (Oscar winner as June Cash in "Walk the Line," fine in "Rendition" and "Vanity Fair") keeps as much of her dignity as possible, considering that she's been stuck with a wonderfully attentive fast-food server boyfriend named Ken, and that her wisecrackin' gal-pal (Chelsea Handler) joins her up on the "ItsFate.net" dating site without telling her. With the two hot new CIA prospects, sex will be the tiebreaker.

Mr. Pine is a little overly enthusiastic as sweet-talking FDR, with indigo eyes that put Sinatra's to shame. (He played the young James Kirk in "Star Trek" and the conductor in "Unstoppable," and it turns out he's a serious stage actor, as well.) Mr. Hardy is fresh from excellent work in both "Inception" and "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" -- and from Pittsburgh on the shoot of "Dark Knight Rises," in which he's the villainous Bane. He and Ms. Witherspoon have some genuinely romantic moments on a trapeze, believe it or not.

Less charming is Ms. Handler as the wacky adviser. We're told in the press kit that she "continues to build a multiplatform media empire" as talk-show host, comedian, actress, E! Entertainment star, writer of three books on The New York Times best-seller list, and headliner of a 53-city comedy tour sponsored by Belvedere Vodka.

With all the product branding and franchising, these people's resumés read more like investment portfolios than bios -- nobody more than director McG (not his real name). His "Terminator: Salvation" (2009) grossed $372 million worldwide, which is more than I make in a decade. As 1-Percenters go, McG makes Mitt Romney look like a Little Sister of the Poor. Fifty music videos and Gap and Coca-Cola ads and the "Supernatural," "Nikita," "Chuck" and "Sorority Forever" TV series are among his more significant contributions to humanity. Time to "out" him as the artist formerly known as Joseph McGinty Nichol of Kalamazoo. Latterly, as director McG, he's not gonna make Spielberg or Scorsese nervous. He is, in fact, a hack. But hacks are people, too.

"This Means War" is an occasionally entertaining, basically lame premise and a mishmash of Valentine's Day date film, buddy film, action and romance. A CIA sitcom. If you ask me which of the two hot guys Ms. Witherspoon chooses, I'll never tell without enhanced interrogation.

Let's just say the suspense is unendurable.