Miles Teller does not understand why a
twenty-something guy like him, who was a physical therapist a few months ago,
is making a living running guns for the United States' war in Iraq.
It’s like this, Jonah Hill, his childhood friend and current employer explains: Remember little league where at the end of the year they would only give out
one trophy to the Most Valuable Player. Then one year a parent complained and
so they had to start giving out trophies out to everyone. Even the fat retarded
kid got a trophy. Well the Bush-Cheney people fucked up big. When Halliburton
got all the big contracts for the Iraq War, all the other mid-range suppliers’
strarted screaming unfair. So now there is this website that anybody and I mean
anybody can bid for contracts on and that’s how we are in this business.
“So you’re the fat retarded kid?” asks
Miles.
“Dude, I’m the fattest and most retarded kid
there is!” exclaims Jonah.
Such is the backdrop for this
stranger-than-fiction tale from director Todd Phillips. Phillips, known as a
comedy director (Old School, The Hangover)
is expanding his creative scope here and make no mistake, although “War Dogs” has a
lot of laughs, it is drama, and a very well made one at that.
The screenplay was co-written by Phillips
and Steven Chin. Chin has an interesting story. In his young twenties he became
interested in doing a story about two young arms runners in Iraq. So he went to
Iraq to interview them and get their story rights. This story isn’t exactly about
those two guys but Chin’s experiences, and his innate ability to understand the type of
person who would go half way across the world on a whim in search of forturne,
lends this story the its impressive amount of rich contextual detail.
There is nothing I like more than a story
that is told by people who seem to really know what they are talking about. “War Dogs” is that type of movie. When Miles and
Jonah (I’m writing this review so late that I have forgotten the names of the
main characters) need to solve problems, they need to solve very specific
ones. For instance, they have a contract to deliver a certain amount of
Remington handguns to a particular general in Iraq. The Italian legislature has just passed a bill
outlawing the selling of arms to Iraq. So Miles and Jonah (under threat of never
getting business again if they do not deliver) need to redirect their Italian handguns
to Jordan, bribe the local officials, and then personally drive the hand guns through Anbar province to
Baghdad.
When I speak of the power of details in
strong action storytelling this is a good example. The nitty-gritty down to
earth stuff lends suspense to a journey regular action blockbusters
can’t deliver even with the help of giant robots and the destruction of entire
cities. And you might learn something too like bribable soldiers like Marlboro cigarettes.
At its heart, “War Dogs” in is a story about a small business start-up and has all the hallmarks of the trials and
tribulation of a good business tale. It has unpaid subcontractors, personal disputes
between partners, the joy of success, and the business deal that goes wrong and
then goes really wrong. This movie could maybe have been made about any small
business but it says a lot about movies, and storytelling in general, that
business movies are generally only about two types of businesses: Drugs and
Guns. Businesses are perhaps inherently boring or put another way, if they go
well, should be boring and so most businesses in movies generally have outside action to
enliven the experience of them. How many times have you seen a movie about a bank robber? And how many times have you seen a movie about a bank manager that operates a bank
efficiently and competently? That's my point.
As a member of a two man small business,
it was fun for me to see a movie like this with my employer. It felt very
right. I mean besides the fact that Jonah, the boss in the movie, is a
sociopath. My boss isn’t like that. That's obvious enough. I'm not sure why I even mentioned it.
However, going back to Jonah Hill. He is
great in this movie. There are certain actors that can really stretch a
performance to hit as many notes as possible and in this movie there is not a
scene that Jonah is not doing something interesting or funny in it. It is odd that
I need to say this next thing given that he already has two Oscar nominations, but Jonah
Hill is a great actor with considerable range. Given his girth, there is really
not so many other actors like him that can fully supersede the comedy genre and
become full-fledged dramatic actors. But he can do it and I look forward to see
him do it for a while in the future. (On an irrelevant note: He has successfully gained back the entirety of the weight he impressively lost over the past couple years. That's too bad. I bet he's really struggling about it.)
Bradley Cooper also shows up as a heavy
dramatic presence in this movie. It is a role I haven’t seen him play before
but he does a good job at being scary enough. My favorite line, “I am not a bad
man, but in my line of business, I sometimes have to ask myself: what would a
bad man do?”
