★★★☆

The well-read bad guy is a McDonagh family specialty.

The characters created by Irish-born Martin McDonagh and his brother and fellow filmmaker, John Michael, are just as loquacious as any Tarantino hitman and much more literate. Their banter has brightened Martin's In Bruges (2008) and Seven Psychopaths (2012) and his brother's films The Guard (2011) and Calvary (2014). Now, with War on Everyone, John Michael leaves Ireland behind for the first time for the US.

The film is set in New Mexico and instead of featuring the mildly depressed and darkly humorous presence of McDonagh stalwart Brendan Gleeson, it has Michael Pena and Alexander Skarsgard (The Legend of Tarzan). They play a couple of crooked cops startled by the belated discovery that they still possess a functioning sense of right and wrong.

Pena plays Bob, who fancies himself a closet intellectual, while Skarsgard is Terry, the bruiser of the duo. Bob is married to Dolores (Stephanie Sigman), who quotes Simone de Beauvoir at him, while Terry lives in a large house, empty except for a bed, a couch, a pinball machine and the turntable which plays his Glen Campbell records. And if you think that sounds like a strangely random set of idiosyncrasies, you're right.

Earlier McDonagh films have charmed with their characters' ease and naturalness in displaying their oddball interests. In this one, it seems as if they have all been built to a list of specifications. There's a cut-and-paste feel to it all.

The action takes place in and around Albuquerque and fuses western with gangster movie. Desert glimpses co-exist with a seedy, strobe-lit underworld of bars and clubs, and the convoluted plot is driven by a gang of criminal grotesques, all of whom are striving to impress with their flamboyance. The boss (Theo James) is a titled Englishman with low-life predilections, his chief lieutenant is a curly-haired dandy whose favourite accessory is a cutthroat razor, and Malcolm Barrett and Ireland's David Wilmot, a McDonagh regular, supply a welcome strain of black comedy as a couple of chancers looking out for anything they can get.

There is plenty of entertainment to be had from all this. Skarsgard is especially mesmerising. When Terry gets drunk, as he does all the time, it's as if the perfect body has short-circuited and his physical grace vanishes, transformed into a wild unco-ordinated dorkiness.

But the film is far from being top-flight McDonagh. His home turf suits him best.