Review: A snarky, self-conscious cop thriller wages ‘War on Everyone’

Early on in “War on Everyone,” a gleefully flippant American cop thriller from the English writer-director John Michael McDonagh, Terry Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård), one of New Mexico’s not-so-finest, takes a moment to ruminate on the arts. Examining the walls of his lover’s bedroom, he spies a print of Andrew Wyeth’s 1948 painting “Christina’s World” and remarks on its eerie image of a young woman crawling over a grassy landscape.

No one points out that the woman in “Christina’s World” had polio — probably for the best, given the movie’s casual mockery of various other diseases and disorders, including multiple sclerosis and dyslexia. Nor is any mention made of the fact that Terry’s lover, Jackie (Tessa Thompson), is reading “The Algiers Motel Incident,” John Hersey’s account of a bloody 1967 clash between Detroit cops and rioters that left three black civilians dead.

The book is just a winking, decorative touch in a movie that treats race, criminality and corruption with the same one-smirk-fits-all attitude.

Like so many crime movies conceived in the post-Quentin Tarantino, post-Guy Ritchie era, “War on Everyone” is a breezily impudent postmodern object — a fast and ferocious pileup of highbrow allusions and lowbrow insults, shoehorned in between intense episodes of coke-snorting and head-smashing. The guys responsible for much of the mayhem are Terry and his partner, Bob Bolaño (Michael Peña), two dirty detectives who give policing a very bad name, if also an enviable sense of style.

Dressed in snazzy three-piece suits, Terry and Bob spend much of their time driving around Albuquerque in a classic blue muscle car, leaving a trail of broken bottles and battered bodies in their wake. The colorful 1970s stylings of Wynn Thomas’ production design are clearly meant to remind us of that decade’s myriad contributions to the buddy-cop genre, from “The French Connection” to “Starsky & Hutch”; you may also flash back to last year’s ’70s-noir riff “The Nice Guys,” whose bumbling private eyes look like models of serious sleuthing next to the lead duo in “War on Everyone.”

Terry is ostensibly the wilder and crazier of the two, a handsome, heavy-drinking bachelor whose obsession with Glen Campbell accounts for much of the moody country we hear on the soundtrack. Bob, by contrast, is a family man and drive-by intellectual who can riff with ease on Steven Soderbergh and Simone de Beauvoir, though he shows no more restraint than Terry when presented with an opportunity to snort illegal substances or hit a mime with their car.

Eventually Bob and Terry’s foul-mouthed misadventures arrange themselves into a plot of sorts. A stern lecture on bribery and corruption from their exasperated police chief (Paul Reiser) doesn’t keep them from tailing a few goons who are plotting a heist at a downtown mosque — a crime that Bob and Terry aren’t interested in foiling so much as profiting from.

Their unconventional detective work does yield a few personal dividends. Terry steals the enchanting Jackie away from Jimmy (Geoffrey Pomeroy), one of a few crooks involved, while an informant named Reggie X (Malcolm Barrett) leads the duo on a whirlwind trip to Iceland, allowing for a cool blue respite from the warm orange tones of Albuquerque.

Eventually they bumble their way into a strip club run by a dapper British mastermind (Theo James) and his scarily intense henchman (Caleb Landry Jones), at which point the stakes finally get personal — or as personal as things get in a movie as determinedly weightless as this one. The title of “War on Everyone” doesn’t just offer a clue to the story’s final body count. It also sums up the movie’s sneering, anarchic attitude toward anyone and everyone — the various comically abused minorities include Quakers, Muslims, Japanese businessmen and transgender women — unfortunate enough to draw Bob and Terry’s fickle attention.

McDonagh came to international prominence with two Ireland-set, Brendan Gleeson-starring dramas, both touched by a distinct regional blend of pungent fatalism and bleak humor. If “The Guard” (2011) was a stylish but derivative police thriller, then “Calvary” (2014), in which Gleeson played a Catholic priest marked for death, was a major breakthrough: a grim whodunit that morphed into a deeply sincere contemplation of spiritual faith and human weakness.

In “War on Everyone,” his first picture set on American soil, McDonagh has taken one big step westward and several steps backward. The caustic streak that ran through his previous work never ruled out the possibility of authentic, compassionate feeling. But here, the change of scenery forces the writer-director to retreat into a highly strained, artificial world — one that, rather than becoming its own compelling alternate reality, is content to hold up a snarky funhouse mirror to the police procedurals of yesteryear.

It’s pleasurable enough to see Skarsgård and especially Peña, so often cast as a genial second banana, taking pride of place in their own vehicle, even if this one fails to make the most of their considerable chemistry. “We don’t live in your world,” Bob snarls at one of his many enemies. “You live in ours.” He may be right. But personally, I prefer Christina’s.

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‘War on Everyone’

Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes

MPAA rating: R for violence, sexuality/nudity, drug use and pervasive language

Playing: AMC Burbank Town Center 8, Burbank

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justin.chang@latimes.com

@JustinCChang