War of Everyone hits cinemas this weekend and it’s good. Really good.
Alexander Skarsgard quietly continues to be one of the most effective frontmen in Hollywood (after you see War on Everyone, you’re gonna want to go back and watch him in Generation Kill), while Michael Peña does his charismatic Michael Peña thing.
You know, that thing Michael Peña does when the screen crackles whenever he pops up and you start grinning ear to ear and go “Oh yeah, Michael Peña is awesome. Why aren’t there more movies with Michael Peña in?”
Thanks for saving Ant-Man, fella. Photo Credit: Zade Rosenthal © Marvel 2014
Easily one of the best action-comedy films this year, the downright hilarious War on Everyone is a childish movie, made exclusively for adults, but there’s something more elemental at the core of the movie that makes it so effective.
War of Everyone works because it’s a good old-fashioned buddy cop movie.
And buddy cop movies are *drags over soap box and makes declaration on megaphone* THE GREATEST FILM GENRE OF THEM ALL.
The formula is simple: take one hard-hitting, gruff character and make them work with a wise-cracking, light-hearted character to solve a major crime.
Buddy cop movies can juussst about trace their roots back to Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa with 1949’s film Stray Dogs. While it lacks the normal “ha ha funny” stuff we now associate with buddy cop films, it does have all that lean, deceptively simple, clever stuff that makes buddy cop movies work. Two contrasting characters with differing personalities working together to do the greater good.
Push the clock forward to 1967’s In the Heat of the Night, and further still to 1982’s 48hrs, and buddy cop movies went from a bog-standard action format to something that allowed sneaky filmmakers to place racial, cultural, and political stuff in-between all the car chases and blistering shootouts.
Want to make a point about police relations with the black community? Make one of the cops a black guy.
Want to make a weird allegory about immigration using aliens? Tell Mandy Patinkin to suit up and ask James Caan not to get too weird.
Want to get Whoopi Goldberg to act alongside a dinosaur for some unfathomable reason? The buddy cop format is flexible enough for all your storytelling needs.
We weren’t lying about that dinosaur one. It’s called ‘Theordore Rex’ and it came out in 1995. It’s less interesting than it sounds.
The buddy cop movie is so good, they even managed to make a subgenre including dogs. DOGS WORK AS A SECONDARY CHARACTER BECAUSE THE BUDDY COP FORMULA IS SO GOOD.
Sharing skill sets. Co-operating to get stuff done. Learning from each other. Buddy cop movies take all that inter-character drama that make so many films boring and shoves it front and centre as a direct cause and effect part of the plot. In any other genre, Riggs would just about be able to get past his family trauma to save the day, but in Lethal Weapon, he has to give that hollow-point bullet to Murtaugh first. He has to get to a point in his life where he realises wanting to die is silly, then he can beat the bad guy.
Buddy cop movies work because they understand more than anything: you can’t get shit down in life without your mates.
And making mates is a lot easier than you’d think; once you stop acting like an arsehole.
Lovely pair of blokes, these two.
Because at their heart, buddy cop movies are all about two people setting aside all their surface issues to do the greater good.
Buddy cop movies work because they take all those life lessons you learned in school and church about being a nice person, putting others first and not judging a book by its cover, and then they pump them up into amazing stories involving heroes blowing stuff up.
You learn to make friends, get over your baggage and do right, so you can more effectively punch bad guys in the face.
No other genre encourages being a good egg while simultaneously setting off fireworks and committing acts of badassery as much as the buddy cop movie.
It’s like learning to eat your greens before you get dessert. Only the dessert is explosions. And your greens really do help you be a better person this time.
Love and respect people from different walks of life, because it ultimately allows us to make a better world. Together. All while shooting shit, doing car chases and setting off massive explosions.
Buddy cop movies are ace. Go give War of Everyone a watch when it hits cinemas on 7th October.
