The one movie I couldn't finish

I watch a lot of shit movies and somehow power through them. Even when it's immediately obvious how terrible it is, there's always some faint hope that things will turn out okay, or that there might be one line, or one shot, that makes the time investment worthwhile.

But there was one time I just couldn't do it. It was an innocuous spy comedy starring three incredibly charming and handsome actors, and I couldn't finish it because it was just repulsive to look at, with those actors all glowing like unearthly children.

When This Means War came out in 2011, the overindulgence of color grading had reached some kind of zenith. It had only been a decade since the Coens gave Oh Brother Where Art Thou an old-timey sepia tone, but the entire blockbuster industry was going crazy for it.

With everyone suddenly watching things on def TV everyone could suddenly, the quest was to get colours that popped and shined on these giant new screens, and filmmakers took the whole orange /blue thing to ridiculous degrees.

Everyone was getting in on it, and it's little surprise that Michael Bay really went for it, but the Transformers films were visually incomprehensible anyway, so who cares? But with a film like This Means War - whose wafer-thin plot had two superspies vie for the affections of a civilian woman - there was no Bayhem to distract from what they were doing with the color.

Because it seared my fucking eyeballs when I saw it. You can see traces of it in the trailer, where they tone it down a bit, but the full film was full of people with skin tones that exist nowhere outside the digital realm. They radiated fake heat, while looking more plastic than Barbie.

Even with the ridiculous name, I always liked the director McG - the Charlie's Angels films were actually well judged for what they were: cartoonish popcorn bullshit. (They got very silly very fast, but at least they had more life than the most recent version.) But this attempt at a stylised palette was just too much.

They had Tom Hardy. That should have been enough. They didn't need to make him orange.