Pine and Hardy contemplating why, exactly, they are fighting for Witherspoon.

More secret agents appear in a pharmacologically induced state of general anesthesia called This Means War. A hack called simply McG, who perpetrated on the world such forgettable trash wallows as two idiotic Charlie’s Angels movies and Terminator Salvation, is hardly the professional you want around to monitor the dosage. The result is 98 minutes of moronic stupidity already being labeled on the Internet as “the worst movie of the year.” A premature assessment? Maybe. It’s only February. But after This Means War, one thing is certain: The year has nowhere to go but up.

Tuck (Tom Hardy, the tattooed Muscle McGurk from England who surprised everybody in Warrior) and FDR (Chris Pine) are best buds and inseparable partners who throw people off the roofs of buildings, smash up cities and declare war on entire enemy nations. Nothing can come between them, including the CIA database, which they use illegally to research girls. Nothing, that is, until they fall for the same girl, a motor mouth product researcher, whatever that is, played by the once-discriminating but no longer fresh or versatile Reese Witherspoon. Suddenly it’s a fight to the double bed to see which one wears Brut and which one wears patchouli. Using top-secret classified files and video-surveillance equipment at the CIA field office in Los Angeles, they break every law to spy on each other right up to and including in Ms. Witherspoon’s bedroom. One pretends to be a travel agent. The other passes himself off as a ship’s captain. And she’s dumb enough to believe them both. It’s not clear which one she will choose after a night in the Porthault linen, but you get a good idea when she tells her sluttish nymphomaniac girlfriend about Mr. Pine, “Four in one night!” She’s talking orgasms, not tequila shots.

As CIA operatives, Mr. Hardy and Mr. Pine have all the credibility of Abbott and Costello. For two-thirds of the movie, nothing happens to write home about. Then, just when the movie is gasping its final death rattle, the international assassin whose brother was killed on one of their bungled missions in Hong Kong arrives, and the three stars spend the rest of the running time doing just that—running, smashing up the freeway, destroying cars and public property, blowing up trucks and helicopters and … but why go on? If undercover spies for the CIA spend every waking hour of the day and night using government property to act like imbeciles, I shudder to think what Homeland Security will do to protect the country in an emergency. I know this is a desperate farce without a laugh in sight, but the movie is dead on arrival and not even Ms. Witherspoon can save it. It is, however, high time she started thinking about saving herself—and what’s left of her film career.

rreed@observer.com

THIS MEANS WAR

Running Time 98 minutes

Written by Timothy Dowling and Simon Kinberg

Directed by McG

Starring Reese Witherspoon, Chris Pine and Tom Hardy

0/4

Need a movie to keep you company until you literally can't keep your eyes open? Join us tonight when we pass out to Cruel Intentions [starting @ 12:45 a.m. on More Max]

Why we’ll try to stay up and watch it: If you need an object lesson on how long ten years really is, look no further than the marketing campaign for Cruel Intentions. When the Dangerous Liaisons-Goes-Prep-School teen film came out in March of 1999, the poster featured the giant heads of stars Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe, but only a tiny shot of Reese Witherspoon, sitting crossed legged between them. For her work on Cruel Intentions the future Oscar-winning actress earned $250,000; now Ms. Witherspoon commands nearly $15 million per picture.

Of course, that was a different time for Hollywood. It might be hard to remember, but from 1996 through 2000, Neve Campbell, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Rachel Leigh Cook ruled the box office, starring as similarly virginal good girls thrown into demographically approved situations (horror, high school or both). Ms. Gellar made her fair share of appearances alongside those actresses, but she never really fit in with the crowd. There always seemed to be something more salacious running underneath her mostly benign screen personas. Enter Cruel Intentions, where, as Kathryn, the actress gets to embrace her inner bitch—activities include: snorting coke out of a Crucifix necklace, scheming to ruin peoples lives and spouting a torrent of unprintable sexual come-ons—her line reading of “you can put it anywhere” would make a porn star blush. We truly love everything that Leighton Meester does as Blair on Gossip Girl, but she only wishes she could conjure up a performance like Ms. Gellar’s.

Meanwhile, as Kathryn’s stepbrother, Sebastian, a bored teenage womanizer who pouts his way through the film and uncorks howlers like “I’m sick of sleeping with these insipid Manhattan debutantes”, Mr. Phillippe shines. Perhaps Ms. Witherspoon should have taken his perfect embodiment of this character to be a foreboding sign of things to come instead of an invitation to hopeful wedded bliss.

When we’ll probably fall asleep: The funny thing about Cruel Intentions is that, despite a healthy use of the word “fuck” and a few too many head-drops-out-of-the-frame-to-pantomime-oral-sex jokes, the film doesn’t seem much more scandalous at this point than a regular episode of Gossip Girl. (That might be all you need to know about how much times have changed.) However, Cruel Intentions does feature one debauched encounter that, thus far, Gossip Girl has refused to try: the lesbian kiss. So we’ll make it until 1:15, 30 minutes into the film, when Ms. Gellar teaches a very game Selma Blair how to get to first base. The reason the kiss manages to be more than just another exploitative soft-core male fantasy is because the two actresses are wildly funny together—no one plays innocent stupidity like Ms. Blair, and Ms. Gellar treats her with a perfect blend of incredulity and phoniness. The kiss winds up being secondary to their skills as comedic performers. And, well, yeah… that it’s also pretty hot doesn’t hurt either.

It looks like Terrence Malick isn’t the only director who wants to play with advanced CGI technology. Writer-director Alexander Payne is just finishing up his script for Downsizing, which would star Paul Giamatti as a down-on-his-luck man who decides to undergo a radical miniaturization procedure to make his life easier. Okay! Along the course of his adventure, he would encounter Reese Witherspoon, as well as Sasha Baron Cohen, playing a dual role of two brothers. And, as if that weren’t enough, rumors abound that Meryl Streep will be making an appearance as well. However, as of yet, nothing has been confirmed from Queen Meryl’s camp. Downsizing would be the first film that Mr. Payne has directed since getting nominated for his work behind the camera on Sideways back in 2004. That’s not quite a Terrence Malick-level break, but five years is quite a long time between projects.

At the risk of sounding sacrilegious, we’ve never bowed down to the altar of Mr. Payne and his long-time co-writer Jim Taylor (who is also credited on Downsizing). Oh, we’ll still stand proudly behind Election, one of the best movies from the last fifteen years, but About Schmidt and Sideways were utter bores at best. In both cases, it was as if Mr. Payne studied Billy Wilder, Albert Brooks and Woody Allen obsessively and then removed all the fun and intelligence from their work. Add in the fact that he was at least partially responsible for Jurassic Park III and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (of which, admittedly, the finished project was much different from what Mr. Payne originally wrote), and it seems to us that you’ve got a writer-director who is a lot more of a hack then people care to admit. Put it this way: you don’t see Noah Baumbach doing a once over on Paul Blart: Mall Cop. Criticism aside, Mr. Payne does seem to bring out the best in his cast of actors. Ms. Witherspoon, Mr. Giamatti, Jack Nicholson, Kathy Bates and Thomas Haden Church have all given excellent performances under his tutelage and some of them even picked up Oscar nominations (though we’re still trying to figure out how neither Ms. Witherspoon nor Mr. Giamatti got snubbed for Election and Sideways, respectively.)

As for Downsizing, well, despite our feelings about Mr. Payne, even we have to admit that this film sounds appealing in a totally insane way. We’re picturing Honey, I Shrunk the Kids as re-written by Charlie Kaufman. Still the one thing we can’t reconcile is the idea that Mr. Giamatti and Ms. Witherspoon could possibly end up as on-screen lovers. We love you, Paul, but that would definitely be a case of punching above your weight class. In a word: gross.

Four Christmases

What's the story: Whither Vince Vaughn? The last two movies the patron saint of fraternities has starred in have been holiday-themed studio fare. However we'll pretty much guarantee Four Christmases is going to be better than Fred Claus. From director Seth Gordon (The King of Kong), Christmases pairs Mr. Vaughn with Reese Witherspoon as a couple who are forced to visit the four houses of their divorced parents on Christmas day (hence the title). We'd like to sit here on our high horse and talk about how derivative this film looks, but we'd be lying if we told you that we didn't laugh at the trailer. We can't help it; we love Vince Vaughn! And heaven forbid anyone underestimate the box office power of Ms. Witherspoon. This film could end up pulling in Meet the Parents-type numbers by the time Christmas actually rolls around.

Who should see it: Ryan Phillippe.

Transporter 3

What's the story: Some of you are no doubt reading this and wondering, "there was a Transporter 2?" Sadly, there was. In number three, star Jason Statham drives and fights his way through two hours of pure nonsense. We can't imagine anyone going out of his or her way to see this film, so clearly it will make a lot of money.

Who should see it: Your fourteen-year-old brother.

Australia

What's the story: The sexiest man alive (that would be Hugh Jackman) and the stiffest forehead in Hollywood (that would be Nicole Kidman) star in the latest film from Baz Luhrmann. Much has been written about the making of Australia, none of it positive; from the overloaded running time, to controversy about the ending, to the many films Mr. Luhrmann steals from. Keeping the latter in mind, it might be good to brush up on The Wizard of Oz, The English Patient, Red River and Pearl Harbor before you go to the theater. Oh, and The African Queen. The reviews have been split down the middle, and even some critics who liked it have noted flaws. In his mostly positive review, Andrew Sarris calls it a "bit of a mess". On the other end of the spectrum, Rex Reed writes that Australia is "one of the most boring movies ever made." Ouch.

Who should see it: Michael Cimino.

Milk

What's the story: Gus Van Sant's take on the life Harvey Milk is one of the best-reviewed films of the year, though it almost feels like an afterthought for awards consideration. Of course, it's not. But while novels have been written about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire and even the aforementioned Australia, Milk seems set to sail along to multiple Oscar nominations almost completely under the radar. It goes without saying that one of those nominations will be for Sean Penn, who probably could have gotten into the final five based solely on his work in the trailer.

Who should see it: Vincent Chase.

O.K., go ahead and make fun of Christmas. Every year, somebody does. Like the people in Beverly Hills in the verse to Irving Berlin’s legendary song who gave up dreaming of a “White Christmas,” I long ago gave up hoping for another holiday classic in the same league as Miracle on 34th Street, Christmas in Connecticut and It’s a Wonderful Life. Instead of sugarplums, we now get nauseating holiday thorns like Four Christmases, and the only thing that comes down the chimney is a serial killer.

Four Christmases is four nightmares rolled into one, all masquerading as alleged comedies and featuring cameo appearances by a supporting cast of genuine talents whose 401(k)’s must be Wall Street casualties. How else can you explain the presence of Reese Witherspoon, Sissy Spacek, Robert Duvall, Mary Steenburgen and Jon Voight, to name a few. Either the lighting in this horror is dreadful, or they are all red-faced from trashing their integrity for money. Probably both. To say this movie is beneath their dignity is like saying Michael Jackson is an obvious choice for a recurring role on Nip/Tuck.

Brad and Kate (Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon) are a rich San Francisco couple who hate marriage, kids and family reunions. When you meet their families, you instantly understand why every year they mail their presents and head for the airport, destined for some exotic new port in the sun in a Christmas world that never heard of an economic recession and nobody serves turkey. This year their Ray-Bans and bikinis are packed for Burma and Fiji when the Bay Area gets fogged in; their flight is canceled; and a TV reporter corners them for an interview that reveals their dilemma to all of their assorted relatives. Trapped, they gird their loins for a marathon of homecomings with four divorced parents, jealous siblings, savage children, screaming babies and worse. (I haven’t got the stomach to tell you about the masturbating grandmother.) Since the entire movie takes place in one day, these people must all live within 10 minutes of each other. By the time it’s over, Christmas spirit turns rancid and 24 hours seems like 24 days.

First, there’s Brad’s vicious, white trash father, Howard (Robert Duvall), and two sub-mental Neanderthal brothers, Denver and Dallas (Jon Favreau and country singer Tim McGraw), who live in a collapsing tract house and spend their lives hunting and fighting. Brad gets insulted, beaten, knocked unconscious and nearly electrocuted before he falls off the roof, while Kate gags on Christmas “treats” of aerosol-can cheese spread and baloney sandwiches slathered with Miracle Whip. Next stop is Kate’s mother, Marilyn (Mary Steenburgen), a religious nut, and brainless, mean-spirited sister Courtney (Kristen Chenoweth), whose grotesque children vomit all over Kate’s black cocktail dress and steal her pregnancy test. Before their visit ends, Kate and Brad get dragged off to Marilyn’s church pageant and forced to play Mary and Joseph, wrecking the manger before the big finale, a ghastly rock ’n’ roll “Silent Night”.

Christmas number three finds them in the clutches of Brad’s mother, Paula (a criminally wasted Sissy Spacek), an aging hippie whose new lover is a guy Brad’s age who used to be his best friend in high school. Reluctantly, they all play a demented board game that makes no sense. Mercifully, this segment is short. By the time they reach Lake Tahoe (try making that drive in one day) and the beautiful home of Kate’s much-married father (Jon Voight) and his new girlfriend, with ex-wife Marilyn and the rest of Kate’s nutty relatives all joining in for the second time in one day, the idyllic couple is so mortified by the things they’ve discovered about each other, so estranged from arguing and so stressed out after wasting their entire Christmas with four of the most obnoxious families on the planet that Kate is the only one who gets out of the car; Brad drives away, leaving her in the driveway. But this movie isn’t over yet. Forced by the day’s events to reevaluate the importance of family (huh?), Brad and Kate decide it might not be such a bad thing to start one of their own—a decision made, like everything else in the movie, for all the wrong reasons. Kids, reasons Brad, “are little walking tax shelters—you can write a lot of things off.”

Although it took four writers to come up with this drivel, Four Christmases has the cohesion of an impromptu game played on a boring road trip in which each passenger in the car takes turns adding a scene. “Remember,” says the driver, “to drag it out until we get to the next gas station.” Reese Witherspoon is adorable as ever. Vince Vaughn has the charisma of a dead armadillo. Nobody gets much help from hack director Seth Gordon (King of Kong). It’s vulgar, embarrassing and (this is the good part) only about 80 minutes long, but the acid reflux is guaranteed to last through New Year’s Eve.

rreed@observer.com

Writer Jay McInerney says John Edwards's reported mistress, Rielle Hunter, is "a nice girl"; she was the inspiration for the character of Alison Poole in Mr. McInerney's 1988 novel Story of My Life. [P6]

Gossip Girl's Chace Crawford told the London Independent that the show's racy content is "a weight on my conscience." [Us]

Nice indie couple Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal held hands at the Deer Hunter/Black Lips show at Williamsburg's McCarren Pool. [P6]

Rudy Giuliani's estranged son Andrew is suing Duke University over his dismissal from the golf team; the school has hired one of the lawyers who represented a Duke lacrosse player falsely accused of rape. [NY Daily News]

Tommy Hilfiger and Dee Ocleppo have called off their wedding, just two days short of the scheduled date. [P6]

An eight-months-pregnant Nicole Richie and her friend, the society disc jockeyess Samantha Ronson, volunteered at a Hollywood soup kitchen yesterday.

Jennifer Aniston recently attended her 20th high school reunion at Rudolf Steiner on the Upper East Side.

Gallerist Larry Gagosian and collector Adam Lindemann are involved in some crack-up over a Jeff Koons which we will ask Gillian Reagan to explain to us later.

Some bloggers don't believe a National Enquirer story claiming that Jake Gyllenhaal has proposed to Reese Witherspoon, but is that because it would mean Ms. Witherspoon was rebounding too fast or because it would put Mr. Gyllenhaal out of reach for The Gays?

Social chronicler David Patrick Columbia finds Thanksgiving to be pretty on the Upper East Side, but still managed to curl up with a copy of Jeanine Basinger's Hollywood book, The Star Machine. Quiet time for D.P.C.

Soft-porn downtown-society artist (photography) Terry Richardson and soft-porn downtown-society filmmaker Vincent Gallo crashed an Upper East Side dinner. But it was only a commercial for Belvedere Vodka. Honestly, it's time to move to Maine.

Variety reports:

Who’s the Gorilla? [A Socialite’s Life]

Powerful, shocking and mandatory, Rendition is a disturbing film that should be required viewing for every school and civic group in America, and then the world. They could start at the White House.

The unfortunate title so confused everyone at the recent Toronto International Film Festival that we all started calling it “the Reese Witherspoon” movie. With so many one-word titles like Revolution, Restoration, Resurrection and Redacted, how do you keep them all straight? Well, Rendition should be easy. It’s in the paper every day, because it refers to the onerous U.S. policy of “extraordinary rendition” that allows the government to arrest and imprison, without explanation or legal representation, any person suspected of terrorist activity, regardless of proof of guilt or innocence. This could mean a man wearing a turban, a sophomore at Princeton, or you. Worse, the Bush gang has expanded this power, enforced by the C.I.A., to extradite all alleged terrorists in custody to secret prisons in other countries to be tortured without legal constraints. This is what happens in Rendition, and it should give every American nightmares.

Directed by Gavin Hood, the South African whose film Tsotsi won the 2006 Oscar for best foreign-language film, this timely political thriller stars Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard and Alan Arkin in an urgent examination of the abuses justified in the name of post-9/11 hysteria. Witherspoon, in the best acting job of her career, plays Isabella, an eight-months-pregnant Chicago housewife married to Anwar El-Ibrahimi (the excellent newcomer Omar Metwalley), a handsome, Egyptian-born American chemical engineer attending a conference in Cape Town, who disappears on a flight home, gets kidnapped in the Washington, D.C., airport, and is rerouted to an underground detention cell in the Middle East. Frantic, Isabella appeals to an old college friend (Sarsgaard), who works as a right-hand assistant to a U.S. senator (Arkin, in one of his most sobering roles). The government claims Anwar never entered the U.S., but his credit card bills indicate he bought $70 worth of duty-free goods aboard the plane from Johannesburg.

Meanwhile, a suicide bomb in Morocco kills a mob of people, including a C.I.A. operative who is replaced by an inexperienced rookie, Douglas Freeman (Jake Gyllenhaal), from the accounting department. Reluctantly, he finds himself nervously assigned to observing a prisoner suspected in the attack because of his knowledge of chemicals. This man is, of course, Anwar, and it’s not long before Freeman questions the inhuman tactics. Why, he asks, is a tax-paying American college graduate who has lived in the U.S. for 20 years suddenly arrested on a whim, blindfolded, stripped naked and thrown into a black hole, exposed to extreme heat and cold, blinded by glaring light, beaten unconscious on a daily basis, denied medication and subjected to a technique called “waterboarding”, a sort of simulated drowning that can burst the lungs. Wincing from the brutality, stirred by the knowledge that his bosses at the C.I.A. can do anything they want with no regard for a prisoner’s moral, civil or legal rights, and conflicted by the fact that he joined the C.I.A. the day after 9/11 for patriotic reasons only to become disillusioned by the corruption he witnessed, Freeman begins to distrust his own government. He also knows that people who are tortured long enough will eventually say anything to make the torture stop. When Anwar confesses and names his co-conspirators, Freeman rushes to the computer and Googles them. The “terrorists” turn out to be the members of the Chicago Cubs.

Meryl Streep is chilling as the C.I.A. official who writes the interrogation policy that determines the cruel, degrading, inhuman treatment and punishment of terrorist suspects, blatantly ignoring the fact that it defiles the U.S. Constitution and degrades the law. A cold cookie with a frozen smile, perfect stocking seams and the eyes of a reptile, her big confrontation with Witherspoon at a Washington reception has the temperature of refrigerated steel. Equally persuasive are Mr. Sarsgaard, an idealist who wants to go public, and Mr. Arkin, a senator who plays both sides of the aisle, depending on whichever team is in the catbird seat at the moment, hiding behind fears that talking to the press might jeopardize the National Security policy. Withdrawing his support for career reasons and the fear of being called a “bin Laden lover,” he’s an all-too-familiar reminder of what stinks in Congress. Ms. Witherspoon, bold and courageous and mature, makes you wonder who the ditzy blonde in Legally Blonde could possibly have been. But it is Omar Metwally, the innocent prisoner nearly destroyed by his own country’s despicable crimes against humanity, who will haunt you the most. Bloodied, starved, confused and bewildered, he embodies the fate of victims of state power, and the film demands our vigilance in keeping that force in check. The clever narrative structure that blends the events on two separate continents will keep you riveted.

Hot off the headlines, this is one timely thriller that delivers its message with a huge punch and no heavy speechifying. The marvelous script by Kelley Sane juggles the dense plot, violent action, political intrigue and liberal anti-Bush sentiments with unnerving force. Responding to international outrage as recently as Oct. 7, 2007, President Bush was still insisting that Americans do not torture people and that Congress has been fully briefed on his detention policies. Both statements were just so much snake oil. Rendition tells you why, and you go away shattered.