War on Everyone

Note: There's a brief mention of child rape in this movie review, because there's a brief mention of it in the film. Figured I'd state that up front, just in case.

I think War on Everyone is meant to be a comedic buddy cop movie. You have the two cops, Bob (Michael Pena) a family man, Terry (Alexander Skarsgard)  the reckless, tortured loner with a rough past, and they're trying to bring down some "untouchable" bigshot crook. But they're after him because they want the million dollars he had stolen from a racetrack, rather than any desire to bring him to justice or whatever.

I said I think it's meant to be a comedic buddy cop movie. I'm not sure for a few reasons. One, most of the attempts at jokes weren't very funny. There are a couple of winners, but overall, not a great success rate. Two, there are some abrupt shifts into being really serious. There's a kid involved in this mess, and it's revealed near the end that his father was mixed up with this crimelord, and let said crimelord use the boy in adult films. That gets dropped in there with a big thud, I presume to explain the shift in the Terry's motivations at the end, given what we learned about his past earlier.

But both cops have been so indifferent to everyone else's suffering up to this point it's hard to buy. They find a woman sobbing over a dying man, they calmly eat their burgers and complain she won't stop screaming. The SWAT teams kill a couple of suspects in a "questionable" shooting, and they make a joke about how often that happens. They beat suspects, then extort them in exchange for not being arrested. It's kind of hard to buy these guys suddenly not being assholes. Adding it to the kid's story feels like a lazy attempt at adding some weight to the story, or trying to be edgy. Ooh, we mentioned child molestation for about three seconds! We went there! We watched the crimelord decapitate a guy five minutes earlier, and he's been firmly established as a sadistic, elitist rich boy. I don't think the audience was going to be too bothered if he got killed.

The film doesn't earn the weight it's trying for, and most of the jokes don't land, so it doesn't work on that level either.