War On Everyone

Do you remember cop-buddy movies?  You know the ones the ones I mean – The Lethal Weapon series.  48 Hours.  Bad Boys.  Red Heat with Awwnold and Jim Belushi.  The Hardway with Michael J. Fox and James Woods … movies that bounced between gritty crime drama and action comedy.

Well that creature has mutated into War On Everyone, director John Michael McDonagh’s well-crafted love letter to the felon in us all, a seriously off-kilter black comedy about police corruption and a whole lot more.  Imagine if you will, a cop-buddy movie where the two cops … don’t like cops.

Michael Peña as Bob and Alexander Skarsgård as Terry are two partnered, amazingly irresponsible Albuquerque police detectives, basically shake-down artists who just happen to be cops and living quite well as a result of everything they help themselves to, thank you very much.  They are so sociopathically nuts, they must live in a world more nuts than they are in order to have their antics seem like business as usual.  Business as usual for these two meaing to rob the crooks blind.  I’ll take the wide screen TV says Bob.  In his universe Thou shall not steal is one of The Ten Suggestions.  Well, it’s not all like that. Bob and Terry will kick-back some of the cash to a crook if he’s willing to snitch.  And even if instead, they kick you in the groin to let you know who’s in charge, they’ll still drink with you.

They can’t be all that bad, and I guess that’s the point.  They’re still policing, and even though their style can get a police department taken over by The US Department of Justice, they’re cops, poking around, running down leads,  and in this particular case they’ve unwittingly stumbled upon a scheme to rob a racetrack masterminded by a British Lord named Mangan, played with diabolical suavity by Theo James.

Of all the people who could be after this super-criminal, it’s Bob, a hilariously profane, un PC off the wall Hispanic flatfoot, ready to show everybody the error of their ways.  He’s such a knucklehead he treats everybody like a perp including his kids and his wife loves him for it.

Alexander Skarsgård plays Terry as if … Mike Hammer had his brain transplanted into Dirty Harry’s body then escaped from Lady Frankenstein’s laboratory only to be sexually assaulted by The Wolfman, which would explain Terry’s night sweats.  While the big guy might not necessarily enjoy knocking people out cold, he sure is good at it. 

Peña’s performance mostly centers around him being the biggest bullshiter on nine planets, as well as a dad in some demented sit-com.  But Skarsgård really surprises in a great physical performance that keeps him in almost constant motion.  Whether he’s looking for a missing teenager who may have been sexually assaulted by Mangan or dancing with his new girlfriend Jackie, played by Tessa Thompson, he really makes his half of the movie his … and he is great fun to watch.

Special mention goes to Caleb Landry Jones, very effective as Mangan’s jittery, pretty-boy associate, whose beating at the hands of Terry gives the story a grotesque edge.  And Paul Reiser achieves perfect pitch in his exasperation as Lt. Stanton, the boss of these two scaliwag clowns. 

So you’re telling me it takes two off-the-reservation cops to go after a well-connected, malignant British aristocrat decamped on our side of the pond?  Learn something new everyday.  This was one of those rare movies I had to watch two nights in a row just to be sure it played fair with all its bits, and I must say it does.  But there was still something about it that was oddly out of place, yet vaguely familiar, and after I read a review mentioning that director McDonagh is from Ireland, I said to myself, okay.  I get it.  I happen to be a big fan of British crime drama and War on Everyone’s cynical view of law enforcement would fit right in with those stories.  It’s even got a bit of the old Irish vs British thing going.

I mentioned to friends I was doing a video-review of War On Everyone and people would say … ‘Never heard of it’.  It’s been out for over a year.  You’d think it would’ve found some kind of an audience.  However, it didn’t do much at the box office and maybe the title didn’t let everybody in on the joke.  Or just maybe the film, with its subplot involving a child pornography ring and its tip of the hat to Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, hinting at those dark doings, was too much of a close shave for some movie distributors.  I dunno.  The movie might be ahead of its time.  Be that as it may, War On Everyone lands somewhere between a fractured fairytale and an escape fantasy, and in its twisted world we find- women in burkas playing tennis; Bob proving to be the greatest detective since Sherlock Holmes; and Terry wondering aloud if a thug with a badge can have Buddha nature.  Think of Bob and Terry as two larcenous leprechauns out on a tear.  Seen that way … it all makes perfect sense.

This movie is rated R for violence, nudity, crude language, sexual situations, drug use, mopery, racketeering, impropriety, unconstitutionality, having an open beer in the car, littering, and disturbing content like telling Paul Riser he was never your friend in the first place.

Step away from the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, sir.  It’s ours.

The Fisher King

(1991.  Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges, Mercedes Ruehl who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.  Amanda Plummer, very funny as an extreme social incompetent.  Dir. Terry Gilliam) I didn't like The Fisher Kind as much as I did when I first saw it in the theater, first because I thought its message of ‘acceptance’ was oversold rather than organic to the story, but mainly because at its core it’s a schmaltzy, sentimental love story made at least interesting because the schmaltz goes through the Monty Pythonesque wringer of Terry Gilliam, a meticulous filmmaker who's just-this-side-of surreal production design is a wonder to look at.

What I really liked about the movie, and why I’m recommending it, is it’s amazing first act where we see Bridges as a New York City radio shock-jock Jack Lucas, a man typical of his type, who will say anything to get a rise in the ratings and a boost to his career.  His spew, primarily ‘Die yuppie scum’ ‘America the banal’ and ‘the homeless can Fuck themselves’ is so hilariously generic that you can’t even be sure if he’s a Right Wing spewer or Left Wing spewer – he just plain old spews.  He puts a fine point upon all this by twitting an Average Frustrated Chump named Edwin, a frequent caller to his show. 

Ambitious arrogant Lucas, about to make the jump to a TV sitcom, then sees on the news that Edwin has taken the ‘die yuppie scum’ trip literally and totes a shogun down to some fashionable NYC bistro where he blows away a bunch of patrons, including the wife of Perry played by Robin Williams.  Lucas gets New York Posted by the scandal and his life falls apart.  For my money, the first third of the film is an original and very comic vision of getting sent, if not straight to hell, at least to the weird purgatory of a job at a video store run by his sexy girlfriend Anne (Ruehl), all cleavage all the time, her lovely breasts in a great bra doing just as much acting as the principles in the film, probably deserving of two little statuettes in their own right.

So I’m watching this movie and immediately I’m reminded of Jared Loughner (and the attempted murder of Rep. Gabby Giffords) and Oscar Ramiro Ortega – Hernandez (alleged to have taken pot-shots at the White House) and I’m horrified.  The movie The Fisher King is older then some kids with fake IDs and I thought, “Haven’t we learned anything?”  Apparently not, which finds an interesting parallel to the film.  Bridges’s Lucas, even after taking repeated plates of karma to the face during adventures with sweet-souled but delusional Perry, gets a chance to get back into radio after five years in the wilderness.  Immediately he reverts back to his old scumbag ways by telling girl friend Anne “Maybe we should take it slow.” He’s ready to burn all his bridges (no pun intended) and go back to right where he started.  That was shocking.

This takes me to The Birther Argument (how’s that for a segue?) and after watching The Fisher King I can’t help but draw a line straight from it to crazy Oscar Hernandez.  Guys like Loughner and Hernandez, (believing he’s Jesus with a semi-automatic rifle), don’t need to be of one political persuasion or another; both are just as delusional and as dangerous as AFC Edwin who feeds off the spew from hate-media to the point where they think they have to act.  This is why I wanted to stick The Scarlet ‘B’ on everybody in the public eye who indulged in this Birther nonsense, and I'm talking mostly about guys from Jim Quinn who went whole hog over it to Limbaugh who'd chortle over the idea, just to let them all know they’re playing with fire as much as clueless Jack Lucas.  

P.S.  I can still get sore about this because I have it on good authority that during The Obama administration there were the assassination attempts you heard about, and the one’s you didn’t.  And yes the Birther rumors started during Hillary Clinton’s 2008 primary campaign before either side picked its nominees, but that’s no excuse for picking up such crap - it's fruit from a poison tree.  Hey, consider the source people.