The Sunday Mail
WITH the “Hangover” trilogy firmly behind him, director Todd Phillips has finally made his first terrific movie for grown-ups “War Dogs”.
The film, starring Miles Teller and Jonah Hill as geek scoundrels who become Internet arms salesmen, is that rare thing: a based-in-reality movie that actually gives one a buzz.
The film just about tingles with the antic pleasure of seeing people get away with things they should not. It is obvious that Philips has been hugely influenced by the money-fever rush and propulsive shot language of Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street”, and by the orchestrated delirium of David O.
Russell’s “American Hustle” — giddy, spinning life-as-a-con-job psychodramas that show you how fraud really works, and that celebrate it, too. Phillips borrows the bravura of Scorsese and Russell, but he also makes it his own, merging it with his more casually mirthful, next-generation voice.
“War Dogs” has a scruffier, more lightly disreputable vibe. It is based on a 2011 Rolling Stone article (by Guy Lawson) called “Arms and the Dudes”, and it is about hip hucksters who make a mountain of cash selling weapons to the US military during the Iraq War.
The joke, at least for a while, is that it is all perfectly legal, because the business of national security has become . . . a business. The con is that these two are glorified hacker opportunists who only pretend to run a respectable company.
But then, to keep it going, they have to start cutting corners, and once they start they cannot stop, since the money is just too good “War Dogs” marks a key turning point for Phillips.
After all these years of yocks, it is his first true grown-up movie, and it is a nimble, gripping, and terrific one, with plenty of laughs, only now they are rooted in the reality of fear, and in behaviour that is authentically scurrilous.
Even during his reign as king jester of the animal house, it was always clear that Phillips was a genuine filmmaker, but maybe it took the witheringly response of not one but two “Hangover” sequels for him to look in the mirror and say: Time to move on.
The movie puts the audience right on the side of duplicity and sleaze — and that, ironically, is the key to its moral cunning. In this case, we are led through a looking glass of financial distress — even though the film is set a decade ago, during the administration of George W. Bush.
David Packouz (Teller), in his early twenties, is a Miami Beach college dropout who works as a freelance massage therapist, a job the movie mocks, but only because it is so wrong for him. His big dream is to make a killing selling quality bed sheets to retirement homes.
It is David’s good fortune to attend a funeral, where he runs into Efraim Diveroli (Hill), his middle-school buddy. Efraim, with huge jowls and a dead-eyed gleam, looks like a bullfrog — but, in fact, he is his own breed of reptile. He will say anything to anyone, but he always makes it sound as if he is their hip-hop bro, and he has stumbled onto a money-making scheme that is based on a piece of “liberal” government policy.
In the mid-2000s, as it came to light that the Bush administration was awarding no-bid defense contracts to conglomerates, pressure mounted to make the Iraq War look a little less like a military-industrial boondoggle.
So a decision was made to allow anyone to bid on military contracts. Efraim has turned this into a business, acting as the middle man to sell combat hardware to the military — not major weapons systems, but what he refers to as “crumbs.”
He calls his company AEY (which stands for nothing whatsoever), and he has got a poster on his office wall of Al Pacino in “Scarface” in full machine-gun-spraying grimace.
What that poster tells you is that for Efraim, this is not just about the money. It is about the money, the power, the lure of vicarious aggression. He enlists David to become his partner, and David has to overcome one ethical scruple that, at first, seems relatively minor: He and his fiancé, Iz (Ana de Armas), are against the war. But the moral conundrum at the heart of “War Dogs”, starts small and then grows, like a tumour.
It is not just about the politics of war — it is about the interpersonal worm of lying. After a while, Efraim and David stumble onto their first lucrative contract, a deal to sell Beretta handguns to a US officer in Baghdad.
But thanks to an Italian ruling forbidding arms shipments to Iraq, there is only one way to make the deal work: They will have to ship the weapons to Jordan, then smuggle the guns across the border themselves. Suddenly, these two armchair weapons warriors have to put their lives on the line.
Phillips, who kicks the movie along with freeze frames, chewy rock and roll nuggets like Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger”, stages a bravura sequence in which David and Efraim show up in Jordan to execute their mission.
The key to it all is that the two actors play it straight. David, tense and calculating, but in way over his head, is our representative, and Miles Teller has the gift of making decency magnetic.
As for Hill, amazingly, he forms a direct connection to the audience even though he is playing an irredeemable, mostly charm-free jerk who may, in fact, be a reckless socio-path.
We should, objectively, be repelled by him, but in “War Dogs”, Hill, more than ever, is a true star, with a hell-bent charisma that comes from deep within.
There is a scene set in Vegas (of course!), and it is there, at a combat expo, that our heroes meet a legendary underground arms dealer played by Bradley Cooper, whose mystique feels as formidable as it does (in a Todd Phillips movie) inevitable.
He helps to set in motion their hugest deal, a contract to sell the Afghan military 100 million rounds of AK-47 ammo — which turn out to be ancient Chinese bullets stowed in decaying warehouses in Albania.
By this point, the sheer insanity of the logistics are driving the action and that starts to consume what is left of David’s moral centre. But Phillips, to his credit, does not hit us over the head.
He threads the movie’s message through every encounter, until we feel the queasiness of how lying can eat away at us. “War Dogs”, lets the audience taste the lure of big easy money, and then says: That’s a hangover you have to wake up from. — Variety.com.
