“Why is she listening to that old man?”
Chris Pine and Tom Hardy are two of the great cinematic leads that’re able to woo an audience the way that I truly love films like this to do with me. As they slowly bicker and fight, connive and scheme while at the same time tying their best to one up each other in the dating game that is win Reese Witherspoon over, and in the process give every still impressionable young female high hopes who’re watching the film, was none other than systematic fun.
I guess it’s the wet dream of any man to have the access that these two have to their romantic prey. Being able t truly enter the mind of the woman they’re trying to woo, but when you take a more critical look at it all it does take a turn for the worrisome somewhere along the line. Yes, I get the competitiveness of the event, and how at this stage of the game it’s no longer your average courtship where either of these guys would just do their 
thing until it makes or breaks, but the film doesn’t really take a breath long enough for you to really care to process that side of the argument for what’s really going on. Which while something that I would be critical of in maybe a film made by Sofia Coppola, but here I will forgive.
Sadly the crux of the film, which is the character of Lauren (Reese Witherspoon) who Pine and Hardy are fighting over, is completely unbearable whenever her or her sister get to take the lead in a scene. She single handedly ruins everything you could ever say about feminism in cinema, or lack thereof, today. She portrays the strong independent woman of the 21st century: she manages her own life, has a great job she loves and is in a position of power, but the moment you put a previous lover in front her all happy and content with his new fiancé then she’s too emotional to deal with that and has to resort to pretending she’s off to meet a better fiancé. It’s conceptually disturbing and pretty much aggravating the soul of the film.
Based on that character point Lauren happens to end up in this romantic three way with these two best friends and bada-bing bada-boom we’ve got a McG film. It, while infuriating me throughout the film, gives us a reason to enjoy the dysfunction that now exists in the relationship of FDR (Chris Pine) and Tuck (Tom Hardy).
The film’s action glides by on a thread of disbelief. There is no point during most sequences where a cool comes over it that we would get from a 90s John Woo film, or a gritty that would come from a Paul Greengrass sequences, rather in this movie they just merely exist as plot points. At times there can be a comedic beat involved in the action, like hearing Hardy constantly need a new magazine, but the action sequences themselves never feel interesting. I did enjoy the fact that our main bad guy (the one who has probably three scenes in the movie) was played by Til Schweiger, who I will not stop referring to as the loquacious type whenever I see in a movie, for no reason other than I’m happy to see him appear in another movie after Inglorious Basterds.
PS. I don’t think we needed the running gag of Pine saying he was a ship captain, which I believe was a direct reference to the fact that he was Capt. Kirk in Star Trek.