Review: 'War Dogs' Nails Cheney’s America to the Wall

Meaghan McDonough ‘17 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer
Nearly a decade after the end of the Bush administration and people still can’t seem to stop talking about his term in office. Of course, it was a really strange time in American history: absurd numbers of Democrats voted for a Republican or simply didn’t vote; the U.S experienced its first major terrorist attack and subsequently kept a man in power for the very fact he ran as a “war president”; VP Dick Cheney was pretty much a puppet master—but the Bush-Cheney ticket was still popular enough to hold two terms. Ugg boots, AIM, Myspace, and Juicy Tubes were pretty popular too, though, so maybe there’s no accounting for taste.
It was a strange time—for the nation, for capitalism, for all of us—and it is probably for all these reasons that a story as strange as the one depicted in War Dogs was able to unfold.

Based on the 2011 Rolling Stone article by Guy Lawson, entitled “The Stoner Arms Dealers: How Two American Kids Became Big-Time Weapons Traders”, War Dogs tells the true story of two stoner bros who helped to feed the Middle East war machine created by the Bush administration. It’s a stranger-than-fiction kind of unbelievable story, and as such, its cast and crew were carefully picked to handle the subject matter. Directed by popular comedy director Todd Phillips, of Starsky & Hutch and The Hangover franchise fame, and starring Miles Teller and Jonah Hill, the film screamed buddy comedy from a million miles away. Unlike the typical buddy comedy, however, War Dogs has one caveat: a true story of which it’s based, that is much stranger, more dramatic, and more thrilling than any buddy comedy could offer.
It’s 2007 and David Packouz (Teller) hates his job as a massage therapist in Miami Beach. David is a college-drop out: a not-unambitious-but-generally-unlucky, stoner-type. He’s stuck in a job he hates, but he’s got a girlfriend to take care of. Then, one day, while he’s attending a funeral, David’s old friend Efraim Diveroli (Hill) shows up looking like a kingpin: gold chain, spray tan, nice suit. Which, to David, is, of course, crazy: Efraim and him were a couple of bums back in high school. How did Efraim become such a success?

David goes on to find out that Efraim had become an arms dealer to one of the biggest buyer of weapons across the globe: the U.S military. The history and technicality of it is too complicated to get into for a review. The short version is that the U.S government needed to buy weapons for the Iraq war, and the Pentagon had a website entirely dedicated to finding suppliers. Open to the public, the U.S government would take bids from companies and whoever could supply things the cheapest would get the deal. But under the Bush administration, the Pentagon was required to give a certain percentage of deals to small businesses. That’s where Efraim—and, not much later, David—came in. But what start’s out as small deals turn into bigger and bigger deals as David and Efraim grow more obsessed with money and their increasingly illegal activities.
It’s a complicated kind of capitalism that’s portrayed but scriptwriters Stephen Chin, Jason Smilovic, alongside Phillips, manage to explain it pretty succinctly. They do this while also keeping the film in a fine balance between light and dark moments, highbrow and lowbrow comedy, as well as giving their actors—especially Teller—some real stuff to work with. The whole film is made even funnier by the fact that both characters are Jewish, and the nods to tradition and stereotypes of the culture throughout the film are a nice undertone. Todd Phillips, it seems, is expanding his horizons while still staying true to his roots.

Chin’s experience in drama and Smilovic’s experience with action-thriller somehow manage to play well with Phillip’s use of comedy to create a film that watches like a novel might read. The pacing of the film is comparable to 2015’s Spotlight, as are the general sense of stakes. It’s hard not to enjoy watching these two stoners manipulate Bush’s system into paying them big for doing so little. They’re anti-heroes, but with none of that cool-guy, brooding, violent darkness brought to mind by the likes of Walter White from Breaking Bad. These two align better with Jesse Pinkman: too young to be broken by the will of the world, but young enough to know better; kind of goofy, go-lucky, but smart where it counts.
Teller carries the emotional weight of the movie. He’s given the more thoughtful lines, the most sympathetic plot arcs, and it becomes clear that his Efraim is simply taking advantage of David. Hill, meanwhile, offers a lot of the comedy. Keep an eye out for the obtrusive—just a touch below maniacal—laugh he gives before he does anything truly crazy. Together, the actors are nonstop as they portray a complicated friendship and business partnership, one that is summarized in particular by a shot of them that appears in the trailer. When they meet with the Pentagon to make the $300 million deal, the pair of them sit at a table in front of a wall, blank except for two photographs hanging on it. On the left, behind David Packouz, is a framed picture of Bush. On the right, behind Efraim, is Cheney. If you don’t get the metaphor while watching the movie, you pretty much don’t understand the Bush administration.

The cinematography for the film is surprisingly artful at times. It’s a surprisingly curated story, with equal part fun thrills and dramatic monologues. It both celebrates and mocks the Bush administration while also drawing attention to ongoing political issues created by the U.S government. It’s subtly anti-establishment while also being funny and out-of-control. It’s against the war machine created by the U.S government without being outright anti-military. Perhaps not the most historically accurate—at least not on the part of the two protagonists—but War Dogs does give good details about a particular time in American history.
Surprisingly not overtly sexist or racist and with good performances by Teller and Hill, War Dogs is so much more than we could have predicted. Stupefying and snarky with touches of tragedy and temperance, War Dogs became a story of friendship, morals, and what one can do to the other.
Overall grade: B+
Watch The Trailer
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQ4mraAx23I[/embedyt]