Hard on the heels of "Safe House," a serious thriller about the CIA, the new movie "This Means War" employs the organization and its agents as a vehicle for romantic comedy, something that somebody in Hollywood probably regarded as "high concept." The apparent originality of the notion fails to spark much in the way of intelligence or conviction; instead, it translates into a slick, silly, and entirely implausible motion picture.

The movie strings together two separate plots that intersect at a couple of key moments, one of them involving a typical cinematic spy story, the other an equally typical bit of cinematic fluff. It opens with a couple of agents, one of them named for no apparent reason FDR (Chris Pine), the other Tuck (Tom Hardy), attending a posh soiree in Hong Kong, where they attempt to capture a bad guy named Heinrich (Til Schweiger). Their efforts result in a spectacular gun battle that kills off a number of villains, including Heinrich's brother, but allows Heinrich to escape and plot revenge against the pair.

Back in Washington, confined to desk jobs because of the mess they created, the two agents embark on another kind of search-and-destroy mission with the goal of getting a date for Tuck. They find Lauren (Reese Witherspoon) through an online dating service, but both fall for her; to solve their problem they resolve to make courtship a contest, with the best man winning the pretty woman.

Most of the rest of the movie shows, sometimes quite comically, the extraordinary efforts the two friends use to defeat each other and win Lauren, who of course finds them both attractive and cannot make up her mind which one to choose. They both deploy thousands of dollars' worth of CIA electronics, machinery, and a team of agents to spy on Lauren and each other. Though they originally vowed to fight fair, in fact they immediately cheat in the contest and along the way violate a dozen or more laws.

The two men separately break into Lauren's apartment and plant a variety of surveillance devices, including the usual phone taps and miniature video cameras, insuring that they can follow her every move and listen in on all her conversations; FDR even sends a drone plane to spy on Tuck and Lauren on a date. They also conduct research on Lauren's background so that they can learn her tastes and preferences in everything from automobiles to men, then behave in a manner calculated to respond to her interests. In another context such deceit and manipulation would seem unconscionable, but the very outrageousness of their conduct presumably makes all the nonsense funny.

The Heinrich plot and the Lauren plot intersect when the villain sneaks into the country to nail the two agents. The nexus creates the movie's climax, which exhibits the usual excessive violence in a mad car chase over the Los Angeles freeways, the exchange of barrages of gunfire, the demolition of numerous automobiles, and of course an explosive conclusion. After that Lauren chooses the right man for her - no surprise there, considering the choices - and everything ends satisfactorily.

The cute, perky, vastly overrated Reese Witherspoon inherits the roles that Meg Ryan, and before her, Doris Day, used to play: the sweet, pretty, sexually nonthreatening cheerleader next door. (Oscar Levant once famously quipped that he knew Doris Day before she was a virgin, a remark that even in our more permissive time might well apply to Witherspoon). In keeping with another Hollywood tradition, the comedian Chelsea Handler plays Lauren's best friend as an extremely raunchy descendant of the wisecracking female sidekick, the sort of role filled in the past by someone like Celeste Holm or Eve Arden.

The odd subtext of "This Means War" suggests the not-unfamiliar concept of two men courting the same woman as a substitute for their own relationship, as if the prize they compete for served to prevent them from something more threatening. Tuck and FDR constantly assert their love for each other, and the target of their snooping might be the other guy rather than Lauren, a presumably unconscious version of "Brokeback Mountain." Of course, in Hollywood, one never knows the extent of the inadvertent, what is intended and what happens by chance.