WAR DOGS

TWO NOT SO GOOD GUYS WITH GUNS

            Based on actual people and events, War Dogs tells a most unusual story of two young dopes who more or less fall into the highly profitable international arms trade.  Not surprisingly, the movie provides a salutary lesson in greed, but also shows something of the actual wheeling and dealing in that tricky and often dangerous business.  As both life and the movies teach us, easy  pickings, sure things, and double crossing often lead to disaster, which is what happens when a couple of moral morons involve themselves with guns and find themselves playing with the big boys in a game they don’t fully comprehend. 

            The two friends in War Dogs, David Packouz (Miles Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), who knew each other in their adolescent years, reconnect when Efraim returns to Florida, partially bankrolled by his uncle (Kevin Pollak), full of ambitions to make a killing in the arms business. He enlists his friend and the two of them embark on their first big deal, attempting to supply an American colonel in Iraq with a truckload of Beretta pistols (why the colonel must acquire the weapons on his own remains a mystery).  The job turns out to be complicated and exceedingly dangerous, involving crossing several borders in the Middle East and surviving an attack from the Taliban.

            As they sink deeper or perhaps rise higher into their new business, the partners accumulate the usual trappings of wealth in today’s America—expensive cars, fancy apartments, a plenitude of drugs.  They also find themselves connected to some heavy hitters, who actually perform a little hitting on Packouz.  Ultimately they land in some difficult territory, partly as a result of diving in over their heads and partly as a result of Efraim’s penchant for double crossing

and back stabbing.  When he stiffs an Albanian partner in a particularly intricate scheme, he and his partner become the target of an FBI investigation.

            In starring Jonah Hill, the director, Todd Phillips capitalizes on some of his work in The Wolf of Wall Street as a crooked, greedy, drug-addled wheeler dealer.  In War Dogs he adds to that image through adding a good deal of plain nastiness and a sort of generalized vulgarity to all his words and actions.  His employs his corpulence, his obnoxious mannerisms, his steady line of profane bluster to good effect, so much so that Miles Teller, though nominally the protagonist and occasional narrator, fades away when they occupy the same scene.  For better or worse, Hill dominates the picture, which generally grows less interesting when he’s absent.  A fascinating story in itself, War Dogs loses much of its appeal in its failure to balance its violence and tension with its sometimes outrageous comedy, summed up perfectly in Jonah Hill’s character.