Warner Bros. Pictures
It’s always interesting to consider how young guys are portrayed in certain movies. Culturally we seem to cut young idiots a lot of slack, meaning a movie about a guy with a good heart but some moral failings will have trouble but will eventually get the girl, learn a lesson, and get what he really needs. So it goes for many such movies, but what about when it’s based on reality and the ending is already set in stone? Well, you have a bunch of choices, and it can be good or bad. In this case I think it’s mostly pretty good.
War Dogs comes from The Hangover director Todd Phillips and is based on a true story. In 2005, young college dropout David Packouz (Miles Teller) lives in Miami with his girlfriend Iz (Ana de Armas) barely making ends meet with his day job as a massage therapist. A new business venture is doing poorly and his girlfriend is pregnant, so David is wondering how he can support his new family. This is a bit of a departure from reality, where David in real life wasn’t doing that badly, but hey, not as dramatic.
It’s also one of the flaws of the movie, that it paints David more sympathetically in general, giving him unassailable reasons for immoral actions. So David happens to run into Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), a friend from junior high when both were at yeshiva (a religious Jewish school). Since then Efraim apparently has done great business as a small arms dealer for the US Government. The amazing real life twist is that due to corruption scandals with Halliburton, the Defense Department was required to put up bids for all possible contracts.
And Efraim has made a lot of money on the small ones that the big defense contractors just ignore. He may be kinda shady, loud, and unbalanced, but he also presents an opportunity for David that he can’t pass up. So they go into business together, doing quite well, dealing as middle men between quasi-legal arms dealers around the world and the US military efforts in the Middle East. Naturally there are a few hurdles to go through.
David keeps hiding things from Iz, there are a lot of potential dangers involved with the industry, and eventually David and Efraim even have to fly to the Middle East to deal with a shipping problem. So it goes until they get wind of a huge new contract — one worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And here’s where their real troubles begin.
Comedy, action, and a lot of “the war sucks but let’s make money off it” lines. There’s even Bradley Cooper as Henry, a powerful and problematic arms dealer based on a real person that disappeared after trouble with these guys. He’s great, doing a very good job as a creepy oddball who is very intimidating.
I liked Miles Teller as the kind of narrator role, although the script often goes a bit back and forth about whether or not he’s meant to be sympathetic. He’ll often make very selfish, stupid decisions but not have to learn from them at all. But he uses charm and contrivance to get through. Still, I think he did a good job. Jonah Hill though was just great, playing a complex, dark character with unclear motivations and a mysterious past. He has a lot of silent moments that are filled with meaning, and he developed an amazing new laugh for the character. Efraim is portrayed a lot less sympathetically, but then again, the real life David collaborated on this movie. So there you go.
The comedy is pretty decent, often coming from the characters and situations, as it should be. The pacing works well and the style is fun, even if it’s a bit Scorsese-lite. One of the overall themes, that the government basically did very little to prevent working with scummy underground arms dealers in Eastern Europe to arm Afghan or Iraqi troops, is a powerful one, but I think the movie could’ve explored that a bit more effectively.
Instead it’s focused mainly on David, which is fine, no problem with having a narrator. But perhaps the movie could’ve been truly great, like The Big Short. Instead this is just a fun movie with hints of a great one in there. The high points are Jonah Hill’s performance and the low ones are the clichéd “I didn’t want to hurt you” girlfriend storylines. Overall though, it works.
War Dogs has a running time of 1 hour 54 minutes and is rated R for language throughout, drug use and some sexual references.
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