Critic Reviews

A thinking person’s Bad Boys, this off-kilter indie crime comedy introduces two deliriously warped lawmen to the screen. Here’s to a Cuba-invading sequel.

While his American competition practices the right to remain silent, McDonagh writes his clever, coal-black heart out, delivering another firecracker script.

For some folks, such retrograde pleasures have lost their bloody-knuckled charm. If this is still your bag all these years later and you wish the 1990s had never ended, however, then everyone wins.

War On Everyone is a pitch-black, nihilistic riot, like a pissed-off teenager spinning atop a mountain with two outstretched middle fingers pointing in every direction.

Much of it feels inconsequential compared to his previous films, but McDonagh's unflagging anarchic energy keeps it juicily diverting in the moment.

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.

Entertaining though it is in parts, it can’t really be said to mark any particular growth for McDonagh as a filmmaker, being both less angry and more cynical that the brooding "Calvary" and consequently less memorable and relevant too.

War On Everyone is essentially a clothes hanger for smart one-liners, verbal and visual, and its success will depend partly on how folks like the look of the clothes hanger.

After the bruising honesty of ‘Calvary’, it’s probably not surprising that McDonagh felt the urge to cut loose a little and make a movie with few ambitions beyond cheap violence and filthy laughs. Let’s just hope he’s got it out of his system.

Skarsgård and Peña relish their roles, but this pitch-black action-com feels like 100 gags in search of a storyline.