My main takeaway from War Dogs—the funny, sardonic new flick from The Hangover and Old School’s Todd Phillips—is that the government should’ve kept feeding Halliburton no-bid contracts as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars raged.
Seriously: If the George W. Bush administration hadn’t been pressured into implementing a system of competitive bidding on lucrative military contracts, noted scumbags Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill) and David Packouz (Miles Teller) wouldn’t have been able to game the system and score a deal worth $300 million to arm the Afghans that they fulfilled by purchasing 100 million rounds of poorly made Chinese ammunition.
As I said: We should’ve stuck with Dick Cheney’s boys at Halliburton! It may have cost taxpayers a few extra bucks, but at least the job would’ve gotten done right. No one does war like Halliburton does war.
War Dogs, if you couldn’t guess, is a message-comedy. That message, lazily spelled out early on in voiceovers and visual graphics highlighting the expensive gear each soldier wore into combat, is that war isn’t about freedom or safety or liberty. No, you rubes: It’s about business. And business was a-boomin’ in the mid-2000s, when the film starts.
Packouz is a putz, living in South Beach with his unreasonably attractive Cuban paramour, Iz (Ana de Armas) and working as a massage therapist with dreams of making his fortune by selling bed sheets. Unlike the war business, the bed sheet business is not booming, and Packouz is on the verge of financial disaster when his old friend Diveroli blows back into town.
Having previously sold weapons purchased at police auctions on the Internet, Diveroli has his sights set on the international arms industry. He spends day and night trawling the government’s acquisition database searching for small-bore items like gas masks to bid on, and undercuts the competition with shady, unethical tactics. Diveroli is looking to expand his new company AEY (the initials, we later find out, stand for nothing), and brings Packouz on board.
Hill lends a subtle sort of semi-psychotic menace to Diveroli. His signature line isn’t a bit of dialogue but a recurring, lilting laugh, one that seems incongruous when paired with Hill’s girth. He also plays nicely off of Teller’s straight man. Whether screaming through deserted Iraqi highways in the middle of the so-called "Triangle of Death" or hanging out in a dilapidated Eastern European nation scrounging for AK-47 ammo, there is a darkly comic sensibility to absurd situations.
Phillips remains an underappreciated director of R-rated comedies, the two Hangover sequels notwithstanding. His management of the actors is commendable and he has a fine sense of comic timing. He’s also becoming a bit more adventurous, visually. There’s a muted Michael Bay vibe in certain sequences, as when Diveroli and Packouz drive matching Porsches across a sun-dappled bridge. We get a sense of excitement and flash, but it’s never over the top.
Though likely to annoy the few remaining fans of Bush and Cheney—a cohort, for the record, that includes your humble reviewer—who can’t get past the "message" part of this message-comedy, War Dogs is a lively and funny flick that inadvertently makes the case for keeping the business of war in the hands of soulless mega-corporations. What’s not to love?