MOVIE REVIEWS: THIS MEANS WAR

This Means War is taking a volley of shots from the nation’s leading newspaper film critics, many of whom suggest that it’s simply not worth the price of today’s admissions. With a series of “what if?” questions, Wesley Morris in the Boston Globe provides a summary of the improbable plot, then asks, “What if people paid to see this?” Manohla Dargis in the New York Times calls the romantic comedy “mirthless,” although she does concede that it would be “perfectly acceptable watched on the back of an airline seat or at home while you’re doing housework.” Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post rolls out these adjectives in her review of the movie: “sloppy, scattered, utterly synthetic,” then remarks that it is “little more than the canned Spam of the movie world — bland, over-processed and cheap.” If you’re thinking of taking it in as an accompaniment to Valentines Day, Liam Lacey in the Toronto Star urges you to reconsider. It is, he writes, a “Valentine’s date dud: Think wilted roses, squashed chocolates and flat champagne.” Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times puts it another way: “It’s not so bad it’s good. It’s so bad it’s nothing else but bad.”