War Dogs (15.)
Directed by Todd Phillips.
Starring Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, Ana de Armas, Kevin Pollak, JB Blanc and Bradley Cooper. 114 mins.
Warner Brothers can't see a good title without wanting to change it. So they buy a book called All You Need Is Kill, make a great sci-fi actioner out of it only to rename it Edge of Tomorrow and wonder why nobody went to see it. This black comedy about two stoner twenty something arms dealers who made a fortune procuring weapons for the US military used to be called Arms and The Dude, a cracking title which immediately grabbed your interest. It's atitle you will give a bit slack to. But the Bros had to change it, and not even to War Pigs which is what I keep calling it, because it seems like a better title, than the almost self-erasingly unmemorable War Dogs. Perhaps it is some kind of health and safety issue: the change was provoked by fears that a film starring a retubbed Hill and the least likeable member of the Fantastic Four cast would provoke a dangerous stampede of people in cinema foyers.
The Arms are a $300 million shipment of bullets to Afghanistan, and the Dudes are two Jewish kids who grew up together in Miami. The movie gets its message in early with an opening speech about how war is a racket – a single US soldier costs $17,500 to kit out – and that anyone who believes it's about freedom and democracy is a schmuck; everything is about the bottom line. That out of the way the film can get into the rise and downfall of their enterprise. (Not a spoiler – there wouldn't be a film if they didn't mess up. History is written by the victors, but Hollywood history is written about the chumps that got caught.)
Teller and Hill pair up well: Teller does the narration but their voices and delivery are so similar you may forget and think it is Hill. The partnership is not an equal split: Hill gets to play the flaky showboater, while Teller is too much of a goody two shoes, but they work well together. Jonah Hill is one of those performers that people assume is always doing the same thing every time (primarily ai guess because he is fat and funny) but is actually quite versetile. Bradley Cooper cameos as the world's biggest arms dealer, looking like a cross between Bono and Eddie the Eagle.
The pair fail because they are reaching too far; the film similarly can't match the grand amoral sweep of the Scorsese crime dramas -Goodfellas, Wolf of Wall Street – it is aiming for. It's a funny and entertaining approximation, a good story well told, but the gap between its aim and its reach is clear in every popular music choice that is just a little bit too obvious.
Teller and Hill's characters are obsessed with Scarface, which like those Scorsese films, is an prime example of a movie that end up glamorising and templating that which it affected to condemn. Some academic should do a study of how much damage that film has done to western society.
Directed by Todd Phillips.
Starring Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, Ana de Armas, Kevin Pollak, JB Blanc and Bradley Cooper. 114 mins.
Warner Brothers can't see a good title without wanting to change it. So they buy a book called All You Need Is Kill, make a great sci-fi actioner out of it only to rename it Edge of Tomorrow and wonder why nobody went to see it. This black comedy about two stoner twenty something arms dealers who made a fortune procuring weapons for the US military used to be called Arms and The Dude, a cracking title which immediately grabbed your interest. It's atitle you will give a bit slack to. But the Bros had to change it, and not even to War Pigs which is what I keep calling it, because it seems like a better title, than the almost self-erasingly unmemorable War Dogs. Perhaps it is some kind of health and safety issue: the change was provoked by fears that a film starring a retubbed Hill and the least likeable member of the Fantastic Four cast would provoke a dangerous stampede of people in cinema foyers.
The Arms are a $300 million shipment of bullets to Afghanistan, and the Dudes are two Jewish kids who grew up together in Miami. The movie gets its message in early with an opening speech about how war is a racket – a single US soldier costs $17,500 to kit out – and that anyone who believes it's about freedom and democracy is a schmuck; everything is about the bottom line. That out of the way the film can get into the rise and downfall of their enterprise. (Not a spoiler – there wouldn't be a film if they didn't mess up. History is written by the victors, but Hollywood history is written about the chumps that got caught.)
Teller and Hill pair up well: Teller does the narration but their voices and delivery are so similar you may forget and think it is Hill. The partnership is not an equal split: Hill gets to play the flaky showboater, while Teller is too much of a goody two shoes, but they work well together. Jonah Hill is one of those performers that people assume is always doing the same thing every time (primarily ai guess because he is fat and funny) but is actually quite versetile. Bradley Cooper cameos as the world's biggest arms dealer, looking like a cross between Bono and Eddie the Eagle.
The pair fail because they are reaching too far; the film similarly can't match the grand amoral sweep of the Scorsese crime dramas -Goodfellas, Wolf of Wall Street – it is aiming for. It's a funny and entertaining approximation, a good story well told, but the gap between its aim and its reach is clear in every popular music choice that is just a little bit too obvious.
Teller and Hill's characters are obsessed with Scarface, which like those Scorsese films, is an prime example of a movie that end up glamorising and templating that which it affected to condemn. Some academic should do a study of how much damage that film has done to western society.
