Review

War Dogs

Would-be arms dealers David (Miles Teller) and Efraim (Jonah Hill) sample the merchandise in the fact-based dark comedy War Dogs.
Would-be arms dealers David (Miles Teller) and Efraim (Jonah Hill) sample the merchandise in the fact-based dark comedy War Dogs.

Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill) is the kind of loud, disarmingly round dude who slicks his hair back, wears Lacoste shades, calls everyone "bro," and acts as if he's got everything well in hand. That is right up until he's indisposed in Fallujah during the Iraq War, and spots a couple of caravans of gun-toting Iraqi nomads barreling down at him and his parked truck full of expensive Italian guns along with his best friend, David Packouz (Miles Teller). Then, he freaks out, and you quickly come to realize he's actually not in control of a damn thing.

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Efraim (Jonah Hill) and David (Miles Teller) meet with Jordanian fixers played by Mansour Badri and Mohammed Omari in War Dogs, the dramatic feature-making debut of Todd Phillips, a director otherwise known for The Hangover and Old School comedies.

We come to this realization about the same time poor David does. In tried-and-true freeze frame voice-overs (a technique lifted, as a great many things are in this film, from Scorsese), we meet the kid as he's just getting started, working as a licensed masseuse in Miami Beach and going nowhere in particular. At a funeral for a mutual friend, he spots his old friend Efraim, whom he hasn't seen since Yeshiva. Efraim is tanned, slick, a rotund wanna-be arms mogul, who eventually offers David a job. It seems that Efraim has unlocked the magical world of big money arms acquisitions, wherein the federal government puts out its munitions requests to the lowest bidder, and just about anyone who can fill the orders can get very, very rich.

War Dogs

87 Cast: Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, Ana de Armas, Kevin Pollak, JB Blanc, Bradley Cooper, Barry Livingston, Bryan Chesters

Director: Todd Phillips

Rating: R, for language throughout, drug use and some sexual references

Running time: 114 minutes

Before long, David and his pregnant girlfriend, Iz (Ana de Armas) are moving into a penthouse apartment in downtown Miami, and David is cruising around in a matching Porsche with Efraim (license plates "Guns" and "&Ammo"). Of course, to get that kind of wealth, the pair of friends had to make that aforementioned jaunt through occupied Fallujah, a ride their driver, an experienced smuggler, gives them a 50-50 chance of surviving. Emboldened from the experience, the boys expand their empire and start courting some of the big cats, including the elusive Henry Girard (Bradley Cooper), a notorious international dealer with thick, prescription sunglasses and an air of inscrutable menace. Trying to nab the biggest deal of their lives, David and Efraim join up with Girard on an enormously lucrative ammo contract, only to have everything go straight to hell all around them.

Along the way, of course, we have the rise and fall of the iconoclast criminal -- see Scarface, a flick the boys name-check at every turn (and one that the movie poster appropriates for its own use) -- with their success and wealth turning to drugs, booze and a rising sense of paranoia between them. Wildly enough, their story is largely based on a fact-driven Rolling Stone article about how a pair of stoner millennials became big-time arms contractors for the U.S. government.

Director Todd Phillips, best known previously for helming the Hangover series, has taken a page from Adam McKay's career path manual, and gone and made a serious film that manages to take advantage of the comic skills he has developed while still delivering a wicked right cross by the film's end. For all intents and purposes, the boys' rise to power plays out like another buddy comedy -- two guys in way over their head, fake it all the way to the top -- but underneath the gags, and Hill's virtuoso comic performance (his character's laugh, a kind of high-pitched whinny, is worth the price of admission on its own), the film packs a potent sting.

As fun as it might be to watch the boys squirm out of trouble again and again, and as much as the film wants us to root for them, even as they're defrauding our government, that's only the setup for when the film suddenly turns the tables on us at the end. Turns out, the guys aren't fun-loving counter-authority figures, they are crooked arms dealers looking to cash in on the government's blind largesse, and Efraim isn't a jolly, resourceful clown, he's a dangerous narcissist who, as David says, "would figure out who someone wanted him to be, and ... become that person," the very definition of a sociopath.

We might have seen the style and arc of this story before -- parts play straight out of Goodfellas, and The Wolf of Wall Street -- but the cold-eyed look at the methodically out-of-touch federal government, having the military procure their weaponry in a sort of poorly supervised eBay-style free-for-all (a policy the film suggests, enacted only after onetime Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, was entrusted with massive arms procurements in a series of no-bid contracts), still manages to shock and dismay. As a companion piece to McKay's The Big Short, an excellent rundown of the financial crisis in the wake of the subprime mortgage collapse, it paints a pretty bleak picture of this country's economic impetus: The poor get poorer, and the bankers and arms brokers can't keep up with the amount of wealth they're amassing. Maybe the oncoming global warming apocalypse has the right idea after all.

MovieStyle on 08/19/2016

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