K-SCORE: 79
Director: Todd Phillips
Writer: Todd Phillips, Steven Chin, Jason Smilovic
Starring: Tiles Meller, Jonah Hill, Bradley Cooper, Ana de Armas
Based on: Arms and the Dudes by Guy Lawson
Spoiler Level: Moderate
“The Department of Defense should be utterly ashamed of the existence of this movie.”
War Dogs starts at its most dramatic moment, offers no explanation for how it is going to get there, jumps back in time and follows the entire plot until that moment, which fizzles, and then proceeds with the conclusion. It also features an inconsistent narration track, which, given the protagonist’s total confusion about the world of gun-running, only hampers the impact of said story. Needless split narratives are an epidemic and must be stopped. I suggest we quarantine any film, director, and screenwriter that falls back on the split narrative and then do a controlled burn in a easily ventilated area.
Apart from that and perhaps too much of a focus on the relationship of assistant gun-running twenty-something war profiteer David Packouz and his wife Iz, War Dogs is a high quality film. It’s at times quite funny as these two young men get in way over their head selling weapons in and around the conflicts in the Middle East. When it’s not funny, it’s usually because you have to say, “Oh, yeah, that’s really bad, dangerous, and illegal.” It reminds me a little bit of Pain and Gain, as the characters continue to dig themselves a deeper and deeper grave, driven by greed and idiocy, and they do so with smiles on their faces. It’s also based on a well-selected true story, in a classic case of reality being stranger than any fiction anyone could dream up. What sets War Dogs apart is the lead character David actually does develop over the course of the film, coming to understand his circumstances, live through the worst of them, and eventually pay for what he’s done, albeit mildly.
The Department of Defense should be utterly ashamed of the existence of this movie. It’s remarkable enough that high school dropouts with a penchant for drug use and lying can even break into the arms dealing business, let alone become very successful at it. The US government is arming rebels from other nations with cheap weapons delivered by the lowest bidder. Their vetting process of these war dogs is so pathetic it seems nonexistent and the reason for that is clearly stated by Bradley Cooper’s character Henry Girard, “They want to look the other way.” Ultimately Efraim Diveroli and David Packouz failed not because they took a back door into a dangerous business that they never should have opened in the first place, but because they were really stupid when running that business. Had they been just a little bit more careful in covering their tracks after their illegal dealings or had they not tried to screw over nearly every person they did business with, they likely would have gotten away with everything and made millions of dollars plucked straight from the wallets of the US taxpayer. It really makes you wonder, what kind of horrifying illegality is going on right now in the world of government contracts, those who bid on them, and those who pay them out.