Film Review: This Means War

Two hot guys? Check! One cute chick? Check! Annoying female friend giving advice (which should always be ignored) about your love life? Check! Why, it seems we have all the ingredients for a rom-com here!

The basic jist of this romantic action comedy is that two CIA agents end up falling head over heels in love with a girl and then make a "gentleman's agreement" to fight fair for the girl's affections.

The stupidly christened FDR (Chris Pine) is the standard club-going womanising sleaze. Tuck (Tom Hardy) is the emotionally deep one - which is odd since he's British, you would expected him to be the emotionally constipated one. And Lauren (Reese Witherspoon) - she's your typically cute, hard-working, successful gal who for some blasted reason just so happens to be very unlucky in love. Throw in some Sade and this isn't really an action-romantic-comedy, it's a straight-up rom-com.

FDR and Tuck are unsure about the penis enlargement tool they bought on the internet so decide to test out on someone else first

I remember the trailer being very choc-a-bloc of action. It was a ruse by the director McG to lure men to the cinema. There's less guns-a-blazing here and more hands-a-holding. In my screening, the film managed to be littered with giggles from various groups of girls, whilst the men remained unsurprisingly quiet. This a decent enough film for a girlie evening with friends or perhaps a date night. But for the group of dudes looking for some mad-capped action sitting behind me - I think they were a tad disappointed!

The casting is a true oddity. I think whoever was in charge of that had only one criteria - cast actors with insanely intense, bright eyes. Whilst Witherspoon is already prepped for the romcom genre, Hardy and Pine don't quite come accross as your standard comedy tag team duo. They've got the bromance down to a tee, sure, but I can't quite picture them as CIA partners. Individual lone agents, yes, but definitely not partners.

It's predictable. Did you really expect a film like this to be laden with clever plot twists? It's cheesy, clumsy but yet there's still some light-hearted entertainment. I did indeed laugh at some of the gags in this film but I couldn't tell you what they were because they're fairly unmemorable. I overlooked the perverse and voyeuristic aspects (as well as a lot of the implausibility) of the plot and took in all goofy charm simply because, in some way, it managed to work.

I can't imagine any of the actors who feature in this film looking back at this entry to their IMBD profile with much pride, but it's not something that they should be ashamed of either. They've probably done/will do much worse than this.

"I'm a doctor, not a physicist!" (Star Trek Film Review)

Actually I'm neither. In bizzaro world, ideally I'd be both. In the real world, science is sadly not my forte...

Today I got to see the new Star Trek film. It's the 11th film in the franchise. Now, let me be clear here - I'm a relatively hardcore Star Trek fan! If I was to list the franchise in order of favourite to least favourite series, it would go something like this: The Next Generation, The Original Series, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. Yes, I didn't include Enterprise - that's because it's so pants that I refuse to believe it even existed in the first place, like Pirates of the Caribbean 2 & 3 and Terminator 3.

You get my drift, non? So my review doesn't really go as a cinema goer, or as someone new to the franchise. Nope, this is someone who's pretty familiar with the series...and yes I have seen the rare pilot episode where it's Captain Pike not Captain Kirk and THAT'S the episode that features the green chick!!! So here's my take on it and no, I'm not gonna spoil it for you...

3..2..1...cue deep, broody stares!

This is allegedly the first film in the franchise to be classified as 12A here. When Wrath of Khan came out in the UK, it was given a 15 but it's now classified as a 12A. If you've ever seen WoK, you'd know that, at the time, the 15 rating was reasonable. I found some part quite distressing when I saw it as a young girl. The new film deserves its 12A rating too. This is one action packed film. Seriously, I think J.J Abrams has been taking cue from Michael Bay. If you're a frequent toilet visitor when it come to films, you might want to skip liquid consumption entirely beforehand as this is definitely a "blink and you'll miss it!" type of film. It's definitely one for the IMAX! Not only are there some spaceship fights (you know, phasers and photon torpedos) but there are some damn good old school punch up scenes and even a swordfight...kinda!

This film is not entirely canon with the franchise and to be honest, I didn't expect it to be and I'm glad it's not. To start from scratch all over again was a good idea, especially after First Contact, the films in the series had gotten really stale. Doing this gave the writers/director some leway that they were definetely in need of. Some of the changes I liked, some were a bit weird and some seemed worse in comparison to the orginal series (e.g. the characteristics and behaviour of the Romulans) - but I'm willing to overlook some of the changes over due to its non-canonicity (FYI - no I don't think thats a word but I'm finding today and terrible day to articulate myself).

Plotwise, I think it starts of reltively easy but almost halfway to two-thirds of the way through, it gets a bit tricky. I get what happened, but at some points the dialogue is so quick and the jargon is just, well...jargony that it made some points of the plot line a bit hard to piece together. It's parts that relate to the incident on Romulas and Nero, in particular, the timeline of events. Since I'm probably going to end up seeing it a few times with various trekkies/geeks/film lovers, I'm sure I'll piece it together. I may be alone on the plot trickiness due to the fact that I had a headache from dehydration (kidney bloody stone!), but if you're not to fussed about technicalities then I don't think it's going to be a problem.

The effects are top quality undoubtedly. It's a Star Trek film, it relies a big deal on this. This set design was also pretty damn good, it wasn't too modern so that it alienated the original layout but at the same time it kept to the 60s style without looking kitsch. I have to say that both Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban looked almost identical to the actors who played their previous roles (Leonard Nimoy DeForest Kelley respectively), Quinto especially so! Really, he might as well be Nimoy's long lost son!

All in all, I think it's a damn good film and I definitely recommend it. My only real quip with the film was that I felt that Nero's character need a bit more story to it, I felt that J.J. Abrams kind of dishonoured Bana by making him seem, in my mind, some what of a one dimensional character. However if you love action films, then you'll definitely love this. If you're a geek (but not familiar with Star Trek), I'm sure you'll love this. The real test is with the Star Trek fans. For some it'll sit in the middle, for other's it'll be a complete miss but for other it'll be an absolute hit!

I'm definitely thinking it's the latter :D