Miles Teller and Jonah Hill in War Dogs photograph via Warner Bros.
Reuniting after several years spent apart, former childhood pals David Packouz (Miles Teller, Allegiant) and Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill, Sausage Party) do what all long-lost best friends must: they fondly reminisce about happy times gone by. While speeding down a Miami highway in a sports car, they remember their teenage hijinks and the accompanying feeling of ruling the school. At a later date, in a diner, they recall the moment when they learned the value of imposing their might.
Indeed, the duo’s rekindled camaraderie is predicated upon gleefully reliving their glory days – or, more accurately, trying to live up to the cool, carefree, confident and commanding image of themselves (such escapades helped form in their impressionable young minds). Accordingly, when struggling masseuse and bedding salesman Packouz discovers just how easy and lucrative Diveroli’s fledgling military supply business is, it’s not just the potential financial windfall that lures him in; it’s the chance to realise what he perceives to be his potential and become his dream self.
The journey Packouz undertakes forms the basis of War Dogs, which charts the true tale of two American twenty-somethings who found their way into the arms-dealing game during the Bush administration. It’s not his journey alone, however, or one simply shared by the far-from-trustworthy Diveroli, frowned upon by Packouz’s anti-war girlfriend Iz (Ana de Armas, Knock Knock), or downplayed in order exploit the duo’s drycleaners-owning silent partner Ralph (Kevin Pollak, Special Correspondents). As writer/director Todd Phillips (The Hangover trilogy) and his co-scribes Stephen Chin (Another Day in Paradise) and Jason Smilovic (TV’s My Own Worst Enemy) adapt Rolling Stone journalist Guy Lawson’s article Arms and the Dudes for the cinema, the film itself endeavours to attain an idealised standard.
Like his protagonists, Phillips races after a fantasy, namely making the definitive modern movie about chasing the American dream (or yet another definitive modern movie about chasing the American dream, given the wealth of others that have come before). And, just as Packouz and Diveroli all-too-adoringly and recklessly style themselves after the film they’ve loved since they were young – Scarface – Phillips endeavours to imitate his influences. There are very few moments in War Dogs that don’t feel as though they’re aping other features; in its storytelling, aesthetic, and music choices, a blend of both Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street and Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike instantly spring to mind.
Consequently, with its rise-and-fall narrative, alternatingly glossy and saturated images from cinematographer Lawrence Sher (Wish I Was Here), and coupling of too many unsubtle music cues with Cliff Martinez’s (The Knick) atmospheric electronic score, War Dogs proves a shiny but empty exercise in trying to be something that it’s not. That extends to the film’s treatment of its central figures, which Phillips can’t bring himself to condemn. Here, they’re buddies who tried to do something daring, rather than ordinary guys who took advantage of a situation as unseemly as the government-sanctioned profit that comes from conflict.
Alas, if trying to straddle the chasm caused by the clash of a serious subject and a levity-filled, entertainment-oriented approach remains ill-fitting, so too do the key performances. At their best when they’re bickering and bantering, both Teller and Hill try to make their characters believable – one as initially anxious, the other as wilfully amoral – yet always feel out of step with the feature around them. They provide a vision of their everyman leads that attempts to find subtleties in caricatures, when the film is happy for them to toe the obvious line. That’s not surprising, but it does make for a movie that’s unwilling to peer beneath the surface of its real-life scenario. Trying to lightly amuse and slickly emulate, rather than probe, is clearly all Phillips is dreaming of.
Rating: 2.5 stars out of 5
War Dogs
Director: Todd Phillips
USA, 2016, 114 mins
Release date: August 18
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Rated: M
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