Standing alongside him, hunched over into an uncomfortable looking position to better fit into the frame, is the chiselled Alexander Skarsgard as Terry, a wild-eyed, hard-drinking bruiser who specialises in knocking bad guys out with one punch. War On Everyone opens with Bob and Terry careening along in the latter’s classic muscle car in hot pursuit of a perp who happens to be a mime artist. This allows Bob to deliver the first of many wry quips: “If a mime gets hit by a car, does he make a sound?” That’s not a bad gag, but like so much in War On Everyone, it’s a contrivance – a non-sequitur in a film packed full of one-liners, sight jokes and general bad taste designed to entertain in the moment rather than add much to the story. Why is Bob carrying one of those lucky waving Chinese cats in one scene? Because it looks funny. Why are there two women in burqas playing tennis with Skarsgard? So McDonagh can drop in a line about jihad. There’s nothing wrong with scattershot comedy, but after The Guard, which so memorably transferred the staples of the buddy-cop thriller genre to sleepy western Ireland, War On Everyone feels disappointingly like a series of tic-filled characters and odd scenarios scrabbling around for a story. War On Everyone riffs voraciously on 70s thrillers and, reaching further back, the same kinds of hardboiled detective stories that have long fired Shane Black’s imagination. Where McDonagh’s film partly falls down is in failing to establish an air of malaise in its modern-day Albuquerque. Movies like The French Connection and the aforementioned Dirty Harry worked because their anti-heroes’ violence and jaded natures were set against a backdrop of social disintegration. In other words, Dirty Harry was a nasty cop for a nasty city. The city presented in War On Everyone has its fair share of sleaze – grubby bars, drugs, informants and so on – but there’s little in the way of danger to be found here. Instead, the most dangerous people in the city seem to be Bob and Terry, who actively enjoy bullying, belittling and brutalising whoever crosses their path. If they’re tortured souls – and there’s a half-hearted suggestion somewhere in the middle that Terry is – they don’t exactly suffer for their jobs. They live in unaccountably expensive houses and openly mock their fellow officers who actually try to be decent cops. McDonagh’s too accomplished a writer and director to not land at least a few outright laughs, and for some, the politically-incorrect jokes and retro 70s stylings will be enough to justify the cost of a cinema ticket. But for this writer, the barbs aimed at homosexual and transgender characters feel too harsh for comfort, and coupled with the brutal violence – more often than not meted out by the heroes rather than the villains – leave a bitter aftertaste. The self-consciously hip dialogue has its characters banter about art, classical literature, Greek mythology and Buddhism. There’s one name-drop conspicuous by its absence here: the Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand. Like the characters in her novels, Bob and Terry’s actions are driven exclusively by their own self-interest. Compassion is a joke, the law is meaningless. Only their personal wealth – and the safety of the partners they’ve chosen to protect – is of any concern to them.  Everyone else – the weak, the fat, the bald, the short, the ugly, the foreign, the disabled – are of no consequence. If this is the true meaning behind the movie’s title, then War On Everyone is a bleak comedy indeed.