John Michael McDonagh (2016)

After seeing an advert on television for War on Everyone, I was a bit shocked to discover that John Michael McDonagh was responsible for it.  After seeing the whole film, I still feel the same way.  The poster for this crime comedy has the strapline ‘Bad cop, worse cop.’   The two principals, detectives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, are partners in crime as well as in crime prevention.   Their exasperated boss (Paul Reiser) warns them they’re on the verge of losing their jobs, thanks to corrupt practices and generally outrageous behaviour.  The movie’s trailer includes the pair deliberately driving their car into a man dressed in Marcel Marceau costume.  They do so in order to satisfy curiosity as to whether a mime makes a sound if he gets hit by a car.  The cops’ names are Bob and Terry (which may or – more likely – may not be a nod to The Likely Lads).   They’re an odd couple of grouchy family man and loose-cannon lone wolf.  Bob (Michael Peña) is married with two kids.  Terry (Alexander Skarsgård) is addicted to drink, drugs and Glen Campbell songs.

McDonagh’s debut feature The Guard (2011) was also a cop-behaving-badly comedy.  Part of the comedy came from the mismatch between the rural Irish setting and other major elements of the piece:  the abundant political and professional incorrectness of Brendan Gleeson’s Garda; the arrival on the scene of Don Cheadle’s smooth FBI special agent; the mega-bucks scale of the drug-trafficking these two join forces to thwart.  War on Everyone lacks any such incongruity: there’s no collision between characters and context in a crime story set in New Mexico, especially after Breaking Bad.  McDonagh’s first film also featured a discussion, among the members of the drug ring, about Bertrand Russell, Dylan Thomas and the distinction between psychopath and sociopath.  That exchange was virtually a one-off in The Guard:  in War on Everyone, nearly every significant character – however vile or insensitive they may otherwise be – has intellectual or literary pretensions or, at least, insists on linguistic precision.  Philosophy graduate Bob and his wife (Stephanie Sigman) routinely discuss Simone de Beauvoir et al.  Terry is keen to establish whether it’s he or Bob who’s pronouncing ‘Al Qaeda’ correctly.  (This makes for a moderately funny sub-‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’ routine.)

The epidemic tendency to assert cultural credentials reaches a climax in a scene in which the detectives’ main antagonist, the suave, depraved ‘Lord’ James Mangan (Theo James), asks a man called Pádraic Power (David Wilmot) if he’s heard of Yukio Mishima. The question is pertinent because his lordship is about to end Pádraic’s life by beheading him with a large knife.  Before he does so, Lord Mangan explains to his victim how Mishima died by seppuku; before giving that explanation, he’s decided contemptuously that Pádraic won’t know about Mishima because ‘you’re Irish, aren’t you?’  That line might suggest John Michael McDonagh has a chip on his shoulder about his roots (he and his brother Martin, born to Irish parents, grew up in London).  It seems more likely that the recurring cultural oneupmanship in McDonagh’s screenplay is a way of reassuring himself that War on Everyone, beneath ‘its thin veneer of hipness and cynicism’, isn’t ‘smug, obnoxious, conventional and contemptible … a film with no redeeming features’ (both quotes from Ryan Gilbey in the New Statesman).

The garish violence of this movie, combined with the calculated offensiveness meted out by the people in it, makes it sometimes hard to stomach.  McDonagh may enjoy watching this kind of stuff and he seems to stage the set pieces well enough but War on Everyone isn’t just disappointing after Calvary.  It’s baffling too, such is the strength of McDonagh’s anxiety to convince himself and his audience that we’re not simply lapping up vicious swill.  For the most part, his verbal wit doesn’t get him out of the hole he’s dug himself.   The politically and racially incorrect cracks are often no more than did-he-really-say-that shock effects (although one or two of the visual jokes are better:  I liked a tennis doubles sequence, in which one of a burka-wearing pair, after hitting the winning shot, does a fist pump).  There are plenty of other things to dislike.  Alexander Skarsgård, more than Michael  Peña, is on the receiving end of potentially disfiguring violence:  it’s as if the director wants – or thinks the viewer wants? – Skarsgård to pay for his good looks but the facial damage turns out to be superficial and heals quickly.  (Brian Helgeland subjected Mel Gibson to something similar, and with the same result, in a 1999 crime movie called Payback.)  At the same time, McDonagh looks to be developing an appetite for physical extraordinariness of a less conventionally pleasing kind – in the form of, for example, Bob’s hugely obese elder son.  There are a few echoes of Todd Solondz in this film, both in some of the human faces and bodies on display and in details like a dog enthusiastically licking Terry’s bloody face.

Yet John Michael McDonagh is, almost in spite of himself here, an interesting film-maker and the movie does have redeeming features.  The mile-high Alexander Skarsgård and the short, almost square Michael Peña are an amusing physical pairing. (Even with the Neanderthal stoop Skarsgård has devised for the role, Peña seems to come up to slightly above his waist.)  They’re also good actors, able to suggest there’s more to Terry and Bob than their gross behaviour.  Bob’s taste for talking philosophy makes it easier for Peña to illustrate this but Skarsgård does so too, on an emotional level.  Terry’s soulfulness comes through in the scenes with his latest squeeze (Tessa Thompson, in a good performance) and, especially, in his passion for Glen Campbell.  This element probably works so well because of McDonagh’s particular feel for pop songs with yearning melodies and poignant lyrics, heralded by his use of ‘New World in the Morning’ in Calvary.   A song like ‘Wichita Lineman’ has these qualities in spades.

Another Campbell song points up a persistent theme in McDonagh’s work:

‘Galveston, oh, Galveston
I am so afraid of dying …’

McDonagh seems horrified and intrigued by death.  He allows even the appalling Lord Mangan an arrestingly candid conversation with his children about what happens – what, in Mangan’s view, doesn’t happen – post-mortem.  While it would be daft to pretend that McDonagh’s morbidity justifies the lavish mayhem he puts on the screen, it does at least remind you that he’s troubled by the dying or dead bodies.  I was in two minds as to whether to go to this film:  I know little and care less about bad cop movies but I’d been taken with The Guard and very impressed by Calvary.  Because I had a few hours between London Film Festival screenings of La La Land and Toni Erdmann, I decided to spend them at War on Everyone.  The picture is, to a large extent, indefensible.  But after coming out of La La Land dreading Damien Chazelle’s next trick, I came out of War on Everyone impatient for what John Michael McDonagh does next.

8 October 2016