War Dogs Review: Two Gun Runners, Both As Unlikable As The Film

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The catalog of films which involves one or two intrepid but down on their luck fellows that suddenly come across a get rich quick idea is hardly a limited one. They vary from the smart and clever to the funny to the ironic. War Dogs is one of the cut from the headlines variety, following two barely literate idiots, Efraim Diveroli (played by Jonah Hill) and David Packouz (Miles Teller). They discover that they can shop around on government websites for arms contracts to help keep the supplies moving for the Iraq War.

The irony being that they both are against the war, but the lure of the quick money is too temping for them to turn away. While in Wolf of Wall Street DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort was definitely not a good guy, his complete arrogance and brilliant business sense made for compelling viewing. Hill’s Efraim is a vile man-child in the worst type. He has no respect or interest for the well-being of anyone around him, and Teller comes off as a stick in the mud with no particular personality of his own.

Sure, it rolls through the traditional story beats of meteoric rise of the business, the wheels starting to come off the cart, and then the buddies starting to turn on each other. It’s unoriginal, and even if following more or less the true original historical happenings, director and co-writer Todd Phillips could have done so much more than just making the audience feel deeply awkward and ashamed of how much money the American government threw at idiots like these two.

Just like in Breaking Bad, there’s never any single pause or reflection on the impact that the protagonists are having on the world. In Breaking Bad the number of addicts being fed by the meth, and here in War Dogs the thousands of civilians killed and maimed by the millions of bullets that are being moved. It wouldn’t even have to be that the characters in the film acknowledges the impact, but this time neither does Phillips and that’s an opportunity lost.

The jokes are tacky and of the American bro in a foreign land trope gets really old and offensive pretty quickly. These guys need a good spanking far more than they need jail time. Skip this one, if you must, go watch Wolf of Wall Street again, that one is at least won’t have you leaving the theater even more embarrassed about being an American than on the way in.

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