Bromance muscles out romance in the wildly uneven “This Means War,” a largely dunderheaded date movie that careens between over-the-top, macho buddy bluster and contrived love-triangle antics that are too cute by half.

Tom Hardy, Chris Pine, Reese Witherspoon

Populated by an impossibly buff and beautiful trio of leading actors – Tom Hardy, the chameleon-like Eames of “Inception,” Chris Pine, the studly new Kirk of “Star Trek,” and one-time America’s sweetheart Reese Witherspoon with her perky Valentine face – the film amounts to an off-kilter effort to bridge the gap between big-bang, hyperkinetic action fare and chipper, chick-flick fluff.

In the hands of the director who calls himself McQ (whose resume meanders from the blunt-force action of “Terminator Salvation” to the campy silliness of “Charlie’s Angels”), it’s an action romance that falters on both fronts – its explosive scenes are too chaotic and incoherent to satisfy action fans and its romantic conceit is too tepid and contrived to win over dreamers.

The set-up is this: Tuck (Hardy) and FDR (Pine) are ace CIA field agents and best pals who, in an action-packed, Hong Kong-set opening sequence, briskly dispatch an international villain named Heinrich (Til Schweiger), James Bond-style, and then turn their attentions to their love lives when they return home to Los Angeles.

Tuck is a lonely-hearts romantic who botched his marriage, lost his true love and is now looking to get back into the game with an online dating service. FDR is a shameless womanizer who seems to take his lifestyle cues from Playboy magazine, circa 1970.

On a parallel track we meet Lauren (Witherspoon), a smart, efficient consumer products tester who obviously could get any guy she wants but for some reason relies on the raunchy ministrations of trashy gal-pal Trish (a zestfully foul-mouthed Chelsea Handler) to coax her into the online dating scene.

The upshot is that Tuck and Lauren are matched up and spend a great evening out on the town. However, at the end of the night Lauren wanders into a jam-packed video store (they still have those?) and has a meet-cute encounter with FDR, who was hanging nearby looking out for his buddy.

Quickly, Lauren, unaware of Tuck and FDR’s friendship, finds sparks flying with both guys. For their part, Tuck and FDR puff up and agree to a mano-a-mano competition to win Lauren’s heart.

So the two suitors employ their considerable spy skills – along with wiretaps, tracking devices and crews of CIA spooks – to chart Lauren’s every move and execute increasingly devious strategies to win her over. Actually, it’s all kind of creepy, in a stalkerish sort of way, but screenwriters Timothy Dowling and Simon Kinberg (writer of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” appropriately enough) concoct enough sharp dialogue and amusing clandestine set pieces to score a few honest laughs.

While the lean and sexy Witherspoon certainly holds up her end of things, the film’s best bits seem to revolve around the comic male bonding of Hardy and Pine, who invest their characters with winning doses of cynicism and vulnerability. Both are at ease in the rough-hewn action scenes, and both seem to ooze regular-guy charm in their decidedly sexist competition.

As the title might suggest, “This Means War” is a macho declaration between the two handsome, hunky male leads. Witherspoon seems relegated to playing a lovely bystander in this decidedly scattershot bromance.

- Dennis King

“This Means War”

PG-13
1:37
2 stars
Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Chris Pine, Tom Hardy, Chelsea Handler
(Sexual content, some violence and action, language)

There’s something eternally alluring in the idea of running away and joining the circus, and that’s the inherent appeal of Sara Gruen’s best-selling 2006 book “Water for Elephants,” which is fundamentally a formulaic romance novel tricked out in exotic big-top atmosphere and gritty Depression-era setting.

Robert Pattinson, Tai

The novel’s simple blueprint and soapy ingredients are perfectly suited to a dreamy, lushly executed film adaptation, which director Francis Lawrence (“I Am Legend”) and a gorgeously photogenic cast pull off in pleasant, workmanlike fashion. Lawrence, who apprenticed as a music-video director (lensing the likes of Janet Jackson, Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears) certainly knows how to cast his stars in the most flattering, soft-focus sheen, and here he manages to make even the most gnarly circus geek look impossibly stylish.

“Water for Elephants” is essentially a star vehicle for “Twilight” heartthrob Robert Pattinson, with Oscar winners Reese Witherspoon and Christoph Waltz on hand to provide some much-needed thespian oomph.

The story opens in 1931, when Pattinson’s earnest Jacob Jankowsky, a Cornell University veterinary student, suffers the tragic loss of his parents and decides to drop out of school and hit the road. As fate would have it, this hunky hobo hops a freight train transporting the ragtag Benzini Brothers Circus, a rough-and-tumble troupe steeped in the merciless, nomadic traditions of big-top life.

Quickly, Jacob catches the cunning eye of charming but ruthless animal trainer August (“Inglorious Basterds” villain Waltz), who figures the green kid might come in handy taking care of his sickly animals and corralling a supposedly untrainable elephant named Rosie. Just as quickly, Jacob also catches the hungry eyes of August’s glam blond wife Melina (Witherspoon), the circus’s star performer.

It’s not much of a stretch to predict that as idealistic Jacob spots a kindred soul in Melina and they begin to fall in love, it won’t sit well with the cruel, controlling August and bad things are bound to happen.

While the arc of the story is largely predictable, the film’s burnished, old-fashioned visual style and the overall heft of its cast (with strong performances by Hal Holbrook and Paul Schneider in supporting roles) keep things mildly engaging.

Unfortunately, while Pattinson is a handsome and likable screen presence, he doesn’t project much of an inner life and that makes Jacob an emotionally inscrutable, one-dimensional figure. It also doesn’t help that Witherspoon seems awkwardly cast as the dazzling, earthy circus star, and she simply fails to strike up any erotic chemistry with Pattinson.

On the other hand, one member of the cast oozes personality and panache. That would be Tai, a 42-year-old, 9,200-pound Asian pachyderm, and a veteran of numerous ad campaigns, who plays the reticent Rosie. It’s her vibrant spirit and cruel treatment at the hands of the sadistic August that provide the film with its most harrowing and emotionally affecting scenes.

But for the most part, “Water for Elephants” seems decidedly light on real drama and heavy on style and button-pushing sentiment. It never really builds up the epic sweep and emotional impact the story promises. As a result, the film falls well short of that old circus promise of delivering “the greatest show on earth.”

- Dennis King

“Water for Elephants”

PG-13
1:54
2 1/2 stars
Starring: Robert Pattinson, Reese Witherspoon, Christoph Waltz, Hal Holbrook
(Moments of intense violence and sexual content)

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Reese Witherspoon considers herself an open and chatty person, and so the chipper actress whose breakthrough role came as the talkative innocent in 2001’s “Legally Blonde” said her newest acting part is something of a stretch.

In “How Do You Know,” Witherspoon plays a tightly wound, fiercely competitive athlete who is facing a career crisis and is very uncomfortable talking about her feelings.

Reese Witherspoon

“I think what was an interesting quality about my character,” Witherspoon said during a pre-release press conference for the Columbia Pictures film. “I’ve done a lot of comedies where a woman talks a lot about her romantic dynamics and is always kind of talking about men, and like, ‘What should I do?’ And this character is a woman who has a hard time conveying her emotions and doesn’t even really want to talk about things which is sort of an interesting female character.

“My character says to Owen (Wilson) at one point, ‘If I wake up in the middle of night and start crying just ignore me, please.’ What woman would ever say that in real life? But that was sort of fascinating for me because I usually play really verbal characters. This woman is more sort of interior.”

The decidedly feminine Witherspoon said another challenge for her in this role was getting in touch with her inner jock.

“That was incredible,” she said. “I got to work with all these Olympian softball players and to get into the mind of a female athlete. I’m not really that athletic, and Jim (Brooks) said that he wanted detail and specificity. He said, ‘I really want you to work with coaches and train.’ So I did that for four months, three hours a day. I’m still not any good at softball, but I learned a lot. And it is a completely different culture.”

She said being around career athletes, especially her coach Sue Enquist, gave her a new perspective on femininity and the potential for females to push back against old definitions of women’s roles.

“Sue Enquist is the eleven-time national champion coach,” Witherspoon said. “She speaks differently. She walks differently. She carries herself differently. She has a different emotional approach to life. And it’s also a really interesting thing, that it’s sort of parallel to being an actor.

“There is, especially as a woman – and I mean I don’t even know if I’m supposed to say this – but we have a time that is our time to work and we work a lot and then hopefully we shift and we’re able to become the Meryl Streeps or the Diane Keatons or the whatever and continue working,” she said. “But to play a character who has a shelf life or an expiration date or knows that by the beginning of her thirties her career is over, that was an interesting culture to explore.”

As she’s followed her own career path, Witherspoon said she wasn’t always given the best advice, and so she’s done best by following her own instincts and passions.

When she was very young, she said, “I really wanted to be a Broadway kid and so I went to all these camps in the Catskills and I had to sing and dance and act, and I remember getting through the singing coaching session at the end and I had my evaluation and they said, ‘Whatever you do don’t sing.’

“I think that I told that story when I won an award for ‘Walk The Line,’” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Thank God I didn’t listen,’ but it was hard to get over that mental block because someone had told me, basically, ‘You don’t know how to do that. Don’t do it.’ So you have to be careful what you say to people.”

NEW YORK – Owen Wilson – with his fractured nose, crooked smile, twinkly blue eyes and tousled blond hair – is every girl’s dream date and every guy’s ideal frat brother.

Owen Wilson, Reese Witherspoon

Just ask his co-stars in “How Do You Know,” the James L. Brooks romantic comedy in which the laidback Texas native plays a free-spirited, womanizing professional baseball player for the Washington Nationals. They got a unique sample of Wilson’s pixyish charm when they showed up in Washington, D.C. for shooting – literally!

Jack Nicholson, himself a notorious rounder in his day, said he was immediately taken aback by Wilson’s guileless playfulness.

“Well, I didn’t get to do any scenes with Owen, who kills me anyway,” said Nicholson during press interviews, “but the only contact that I had with him was that he called me up when I first got there and he said, ‘Hey, do you want to go out and shoot machine guns?’ I thought, ‘Oh, my God, all these guys think that I’m adventurous.’”

Witherspoon chimed in, “He invited me, too. It’s kind of awesome.”

“The man is charming,” Nicholson said with a rascally shrug of his shoulders.

Wilson, sitting nearby with a Cheshire cat’s grin on his face, confirmed the story.

“I actually did (go out shooting machine guns),” he said. “It was like a friend knew somebody at one of the embassies that had a tennis court. And then when they let us on to play tennis, we found out that they had a machine gun range underneath the embassy, and they took us to shoot on it.”

- Dennis King

BY DENNIS KING

NEW YORK – Flanked by a trio of the freshest young actors in contemporary film, Jack Nicholson seems to relish his status as Hollywood’s resident lovable rogue.

Since his heyday as counterculture radical in landmark movies such as “Easy Rider,” “Five Easy Pieces” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Nicholson has lived a high-profile playboy’s life and settled into a kind of elder rebel-emeritus status on screen, burnished by the patina of his bad-boy past and his three acting Oscars.

Jack Nicholson

If there’s a mischievous twinkle in his eyes when he talks about his latest role as a “cuddly shark” in writer-director James L. Brooks’ “How Do You Know,” it is masked by his ubiquitous, signature shades. But when Nicholson talks about working again with Brooks or hanging out and acting with co-stars Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd, there’s a weathered warmth in his voice that belies his hipster cool.

“It’s a privilege to work with Jim. He’s probably one of the best screenwriters in the world, and you just get great material and he can always cast wonderful actors. Just look at us all,” Nicholson said, gesturing grandly to his young co-stars during a press conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Central Park hosted by Columbia Pictures.

With Brooks on one side and Witherspoon, Wilson and Rudd on the other, Nicholson held court in a sense as he talked about Brooks’ new romantic comedy. In it, he plays a deeply flawed father and sharky business mogul trying to balance his love for his son with his instincts for self-preservation. Nicholson’s bond with Brooks goes way back to his Oscar-winning performances in “Terms of Endearment” and “As Good As It Gets,” sandwiched between a memorable turn in “Broadcast News.” (Nicholson’s other Oscar, his first, came for Milos Forman’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1976.)

In “How Do You Know,” Nicholson is essentially in a supporting role – but one that fits him like a tailored suit. He plays Charles, an oily industrialist whose company is under federal investigation for fraud. Unfortunately, blame for Charles’ shady shenanigans falls on his decent but clueless son, George (Rudd), who recently took the corporate reins. As George’s life is falling apart, he stumbles into a romantic triangle with Witherspoon’s Lisa, an Olympic softball player in crisis at the end of her career, and Wilson’s Matty, a playboy pitcher for the Washington Nationals.

For his part, Nicholson’s charmingly caddish Charles occupies a subplot in which he hopes to help his son out of his legal jam while avoiding a lengthy, and well-deserved, prison sentence for himself.

“There are always different things that make parts difficult,” Nicholson said of his raffish character. “I’ve played a lot of bad or semi-bad people and you always have to be on the character’s side. I didn’t have any problem analyzing this character. It wasn’t really the tough part of it for me. I liked playing the father even though he’s not a great father, but I think you can see that he really does care even though he chooses business over his own son. He really didn’t think that he was doing that much wrong. I was a little worried about that myself since I feel like I am a loveable shark. Those are the kinds of things that you have to finesse.”

Brooks said he wrote the character as a personification of a certain kind of predator afoot in America’s financial jungles.

“Everything that’s been going on (in the economy) has been an attack on our personhoods. That shark that you’re talking about is representative of a certain kind of American businessman. I think he’s typical,” Brooks said.

“I am someone who’s obsessive about specifics and detail and I couldn’t pick a business to put up front,” the director continued. “Then I realized that Jack’s character is representative of the whole breed. And also, I realized that so much has gone wrong, and our trust has been eroded to such an extent by the absence of real role models anyplace in our lives, that the last holdout is people needing each other and holding hands and taking it on together. I sort of felt that when I wrote this.”

Nicholson, 73, said Brooks is the kind of director that makes him excited to keep making movies.

“With Jim you have to remember that he writes comedies like nobody else,” the actor said. “I mean, you’re dealing with life, death, business crime, fatherhood, motherhood, all these very serious topics and everything is funny at the same time. It has truth and it’s funny, but what he attacks to begin with is where it’s really distinct if you reviewed it – cancer, news, all this kind of thing. And I know it’s the goal he sets himself. He sets himself very interesting goals.

“Like, I remember the one that I particularly liked was in ‘As Good As It Gets.’ He says, ‘Number one, I want to write a part for the dog.’ He said, ‘I also want (the dog) to get a specific laugh based on language.’ So I mean he just picks out really hard things to do and then it’s supposed to look easy, kind of like Fred Astaire, but where he starts is always amazing to me.”

After a stellar career that has featured the above-mention films as well as era-defining movies such as “The Shining,” “Prizzi’s Honor,” “A Few Good Men,” “The Departed” and “The Bucket List,” Nicholson said he really doesn’t have anything left to prove. So he picks the roles he does take on very carefully.

“I’m kind of a guy that likes to prove things and all my life when I’ve said, ‘I’m so sick of (working),” and everyone always said, ‘Oh, God, man. You couldn’t not work.’ Well, I’m kind of proving them wrong. I read a lot of scripts and so I feel like I do a lot of movies and stuff, but they’re all the same. I like not working. I know that’s hideous, blasphemous, but I really do. I think I’ve started to infect others, young guys. I had a conversation with Leo (DiCaprio) and he said, ‘I love not working.’ I said, ‘See what I mean?’ I don’t really want to infect him.”

So, what does he do when he’s not working?

“It’s a press conference and I like to give great answers, but I just like getting up sometimes between eleven and one,” he said hesitantly. “It’s not movie hours unless you’re doing night movies. I play golf. I have a couple of kids in college and so I’m on the phone a lot. I see my pals. Various women around. Talk to my congressman. Go to funerals.”

What about rooting for his beloved Los Angeles Lakers?

“That’s more of a job,” Nicholson said with that patented bad-boy grin. “I have to be there (at courtside).”

But what is it that he still loves about making movies?

“Travel. Beautiful women. Excellent compatriots. Drinking pals. It’s very exciting. It’s just an exciting business,” Nicholson said. “We’ve all been doing it a while. I think we all get nervous, we get wild and that should be all I say, I think.”

The cosmic question at the heart of James L. Brooks’ latest, appealingly quirky romantic comedy is “How Do You Know.”

Owen Wilson

Although the writer-director of such grown-up comedies as “Broadcast News,” “As Good As It Gets” and “Spanglish” fails to punctuate his latest properly (something to do with an old Hollywood superstition about an ill fate for movies with question marks in their titles), he does offer up some pointed and poignant inquiries into the nature of love, romantic fate and commitment.

“How Do You Know,” like most of Brooks’ so-called “dramadies,” features decent but flawed characters and a messy, loose-ends plotline that aptly reflects modern life with all its funny and heartbreaking imperfections.

Paul Rudd

The unspoken extension of the film’s title query is: how do you know when you’re really, truly in love?

And Brooks employs a well-scrubbed trio of highly likable, dazzlingly photogenic and apparently expensive stars (reported payroll: $50 million) to pursue that question through a thoughtful and complex if meandering narrative.

It all starts as we meet Lisa (Reese Witherspoon, dithering but sexy), an Olympic-caliber softball player who, at 27, is unceremoniously cut from the U.S. national team. Uncertain about her future, and equally uncertain about her romantic fling with playboy Washington Nationals pitcher Matty (Owen Wilson, a charming rascal), Lisa agrees to a quicky blind date with businessman George (Paul Rudd, a likable everyman).

George has just received word that he’s about to be indicted for fraud for some dubious doings at the corporation whose head job he’s just inherited from his wheeler-dealer father Charles (Jack Nicholson playing, well, Jack Nicholson).

Reese Witherspoon

Naturally, the date between these two distracted young people is a disaster. But, something about George’s vulnerability and decency sticks with Lisa. And something about Matty’s guileless honesty and womanizing past leaves her with deep doubts about their relationship. And so an offbeat love triangle develops – Lisa slightly indifferent to prospects of love; Matty willing to settle down with Lisa despite the bounties of his single life; George gently viewing Lisa as a lifeline to sanity.

Meanwhile, in a pithy subplot, George’s morally slippery father struggles to come to grips with his guilt, his horror at going to prison and his love for his clueless and innocent son.

Certainly, Brooks knows how to create memorable, offbeat characters and place them in stories that deliver plenty of smart laughs, along with an undercurrent of social timeliness and heart-tugging drama. As a writer, director and producer, Brooks has won three Oscars (for “Terms of Endearment”) and 18 Emmy Awards (for his work on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Taxi” “The Tracey Ullman Show” and “The Simpsons”) essentially doing just that.

But his stories are hard to categorize because they don’t quite fit the standard romantic comedy mold. Their characters are too idiosyncratic, their plot turns too unpredictable, their conclusions too open-ended. In other words, as he does in “How do You Know,” Brooks turns formula upside down and shakes out something original and true.

How do you know when you’ve seen a James L. Brooks movie? You’re left thinking about it and marveling at its wondrous foibles long after you’ve left the theater.

- Dennis King

“How Do You Know”

PG-13
1:56
3 stars
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson, Paul Rudd, Kathryn Hahn
(sexual content and some strong language)

Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd

NEW YORK – James L. Brooks’ offbeat romantic comedy “How Do You Know” gets moving with a disastrous blind date between distracted characters played by Reese Witherspoon and Paul Rudd. The fidgety, nearly speechless date most likely constitutes every single person’s idea of dating hell.

Witherspoon and Rudd were asked to recall their own real-life worst dates during press interviews prior to the film’s release by Columbia Pictures.

Witherspoon, smart, blond and adorable, clearly had very little experience to draw from as she furrowed her brow and searched for an answer.

“I had someone correct my grammar on a blind date, and I knew in the first ten minutes that the date was over,” she finally revealed. “Yeah, you just don’t correct someone’s grammar.”

Does she remember what she said wrong?

“I don’t know,” she said brightly. “I’m from Tennessee. I probably say everything wrong. I probably said ain’t or something.”

Rudd, on the other hand, seemed to take a guy’s-guy relish in recounting his worst dating nightmare.

“A friend and I went on a double date with these two girls and uh, it started off we were trying to impress the girls and make each other laugh,” Rudd recalled. “And it started out innocently enough with my friend kicking his shoe 30 feet in the air as we’re walking down the street. And it really struck me as funny.

“So then I try to outdo him. I jumped on a mailbox or something, and each thing kept escalating,” he said. “The girls didn’t laugh at any of this. But it ended finally as I was driving, we were driving home, I had a Jeep at the time. And I thought it would be funny if, in the middle of a conversation, I’d jump out of the Jeep and run alongside, keep the conversation going as if it was normal.

“But I didn’t take into account that when you’re going slow in a car, it’s still really fast,” he said with a wry shrug. “I was in the middle of the conversation and stepped out of the car and fell so hard on the pavement, I ripped my jeans and cut up my hands and felt the tire whoosh past my head.

“And I looked up and in a split second the car was already 50 feet in front of me going toward a tree. They looked completely shellshocked, and I felt so stupid. And then we just drove home in silence. And that was the only date I had with that girl.”

How old was he at the time?

“In my late twenties,” Rudd said sheepishly. “Old enough to know better.”

- Dennis King