Slap Witherspoon — and Chris Pine — with a Reese and desist order for making this flick. (20th Century Fox)
Nothing says Valentine’s Day like watching a couple of CIA agents preparing to torture a suspected terrorist with a pair of pliers, right?
Unless it’s the buff heroes of director McG’s spectacularly awful new action comedy “This Means War’’ — played by Chris Pine and Tom Hardy — watching each other woo Reese Witherspoon on video surveillance screens.
Nearly totally laugh-, chemistry- and coherence-free, this fiasco from the director of “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle’’ has a script whose sensible parts would fit on a napkin with enough room left over for the Gettysburg Address.
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It’s set in an alternate universe where 30-something CIA agents use words like “hanky-panky’’ and have to resort to online dating services to get a little action.
Tuck (Hardy) is instantly — and somewhat mysteriously — smitten with Lauren (Witherspoon), an uptight product tester whose randy married BFF (Chelsea Handler) has signed her up for the same dating service behind her back.
But then, Tuck’s partner FDR (Pine) is also hot for her, even if he has a strange way of showing it sometimes.
“Go back to the retirement village,’’ the 31-year-old actor’s character tells Lauren, who is being played by a 35-year-old.
Perhaps FDR is confused (a sentiment sure to be shared by the audience) because Witherspoon seems to be dressed in Kmart’s unflattering Aging Oscar Winner Collection, or because the studio has apparently neglected to provide her with the services of a hairdresser to deal with her flyaway locks.
Witherspoon suddenly sports dangling earrings in the middle of one scene, and the guys have wounds that don’t match from scene to scene in a flick so riddled with continuity errors it will earn a special place on moviemistakes.com.
These manifold technical errors — even the action-sequence shots seem to have been edited with a roulette wheel — wouldn’t matter so much if either of the actors looked plausible with Witherspoon, a talented actress who’s required by the script to act like someone 10 years her junior.
Or, for the movie’s target audience, if someone had remembered to ask the actors to take their shirts off. For a movie called “This Means War,’’ even the male stars’ climactic fisticuffs looks like an afterthought.
But this is a movie full of such expensive-looking head-scratchers, including sequences where our government-employee heroes try to impress Lauren (who thinks Tuck is a travel agent and FDR a cruise-ship captain) with their access to a full-scale trapeze and the complete works of Gustav Klimt.
It’s a film riddled with scenes that set up other scenes that appear to have been deleted. (Ms. Handler’s unfunny smutty remarks were trimmed to avoid an R rating. )
Angela Bassett, who plays the guys’ boss, disappears midway — was her character abducted or did the actress simply quit in disgust?
No “True Lies’’ or even ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith’’ (it shares a writer with the latter), this rom-com bomb even resorts to the desperate but rarely successful narrative strategy of referencing earlier, better movies like “Titanic.’’
In a scene set in the kind of big video store that disappeared years ago, FDR tells Lauren that Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes’’ is “ sort of a second-tier title.’’
To what tier of romantic comedies does “This Means War’’ belong? You’d have to start at zero and work your way down.
lou.lumenick@nypost.com