War Dogs

There is some­thing unique­ly trou­bling about the film War Dogs, and it has noth­ing to do with its wannabe explo­sive, ripped-from-the-head­lines sub­ject mat­ter. It casu­al­ly reels off the true tale of two twen­tysome­thing ice-white dude­bros who par­lay their mild busi­ness acu­men and an awe­some dex­ter­i­ty for bull­shit into a glob­al arms logis­tics agency. The dis­cov­ery of a gov­ern­ment loop­hole which allows them to bid on gigan­tic (and increas­ing­ly volatile) trade oppor­tu­ni­ties even­tu­al­ly leads these wily chancers into very chop­py waters.

The con­flict that comes of mouthy, aggres­sive and woe­ful­ly under qual­i­fied wide­boys enter­ing into a world which is clear­ly more com­plex than they can instant­ly com­pre­hend has become a mod­ern dra­mat­ic boil­er­plate – the Amer­i­can dream­ers ham­mer­ing bureau­crat­ic weak spots for tidy per­son­al gain. Yet where War Dogs offers a cau­tious cel­e­bra­tion of reck­less, indus­tri­ous youth, the film itself is the prod­uct of a film­mak­er who is utter­ly unwill­ing to scav­enge for advan­ta­geous points of entry.

It is some­times so tired and lack­ing in basic inspi­ra­tion, that the biggest laughs are often unin­ten­tion­al. Exam­ple: its com­i­cal­ly inept use of musi­cal cues. A sequence in which the chest-bump­ing duo, played by Miles Teller and Jon­ah Hill, ingest some coke togeth­er in an office, and House of Pain’s ​‘Jump Around’ drops on to the sound­track like a 10-tonne dumb­bell. It feels like a com­e­dy hold­ing track that was acci­den­tal­ly left in the final cut. Lat­er, when the pair are forced to trav­el to Jor­dan to secure a ship­ment of guns des­tined for US forces in Bagh­dad, Iggy Pop’s ​‘The Pas­sen­ger’ plays over a mon­tage of stock sky­line vis­tas. Make your sap­py true-life tabloid sto­ry, but at the very least take a small amount of time flip­ping back over the entire his­to­ry of music in search of a cut that’s more inter­est­ing, more vital than the god-damn Pas­sen­ger – some­thing which doesn’t instant­ly remind you of many oth­er, bet­ter movies.

In fact, the whole enter­prise feels like it made up of hold­ing mate­r­i­al, await­ing the real take, the real edit, the real song, the real voice over, the real line read­ing, the real inter-title. Direc­tor Todd Phillips is not some­one known for his film­mak­ing finesse, hav­ing found under­stand­able suc­cess with row­dy, rough-edged come­dies such as Road Trip and The Hang­over tril­o­gy. Yet, he comes a‑cropper in his attempt to fol­low his old pal Adam McK­ay on to the bat­tle­field of Seri­ous Film Art, and try as he might to emu­late its beats and its tone, this is no The Big Short (faint praise, we realise).

As in so many films of its ilk, we observe as the improb­a­ble wads of cash are amassed and then, at the point where things just get a lit­tle too loco, every­thing goes to shit. That our heroes are two men who we would hap­pi­ly see ground down into burg­er pat­ties and served to the inmates of a north­ern reform school is moot. Their essen­tial scum­bag­gery is duly pun­ished with sym­bol­ic prison sen­tences which help to per­pet­u­ate the myth that white col­lar crime is vic­tim­less, even when the film shows that it clear­ly isn’t.

Aside from its more obvi­ous pre­de­ces­sors, War Dogs also takes a super­fi­cial, but inter­est­ing look at the cul­tur­al lega­cy of Bri­an De Palma’s Scar­face. Hill’s Efraim Diveroli mounts a giant screen-cap can­vas of Al Paci­no wield­ing his ​“lit­tle friend” on the wall of his office like a moral totem. He ref­er­ences the film, claim­ing that the pair are akin to high-rolling gang­sters, get­ting shit done like mon­ey-mak­ing machines, leav­ing the ethics of their endeav­our for some­one else to deal with. Phillips con­stant­ly finds ways to let his heroes of the hook, always tak­ing their seman­tic swerv­ing at face val­ue. He is loath to just let their crim­i­nal con­niv­ing be judged as such. There’s always the sense that this film will only work if an audi­ence believes that the scamp­ish wars dogs them­selves are full-bore badass­es, and not pathet­ic bot­tom-feed­ers in hand-me-down cabana wear.

But per­haps the film’s biggest crime is its awful and manip­u­la­tive depic­tion of any coun­try out­side of the US. Phillips offers a broad-brush, dan­ger­ous­ly impres­sion­is­tic take on far-flung locales which hinges on limp eth­nic stereo­types and places hard empha­sis on the fact that any­where that isn’t Mia­mi is like­ly to be a dilap­i­dat­ed, back­ward shit­box pop­u­lat­ed by trig­ger-hap­py goons or eas­i­ly exploit­ed help-meets. Whether it’s inten­tion­al or not is uncer­tain, but the film’s hate­ful­ly bleak depic­tion of Alba­nia (pure­ly to ramp up the dra­ma of their final big score) is maybe the final insult in a movie doesn’t even have the where­with­al to realise when its shirk­ing polit­i­cal correctness.