Movie Review: War Dogs

The Hangover and Old School director Todd Phillips shows off his serious (but no less bro-centric) side in War Dogs.

(“That’s why I like the arms business,” Bradley Cooper’s skeezy gun-runner Henry Girard says towards the end of the flick. “No women.” He could also be talking about Phillips’ entire filmography.)

Leaving behind a trail of soul-blackened comedies, Phillips attempts an excursion into Marty Scorsese territory, adapting (with artistic licence) the true story of Efraim Diveroli and David Packouz, twenty-somethings who made a quick million selling defective weaponry to the U.S. military during the Iraq war.

Phillips brings with him a totem: Jonah Hill, another figure who made his name in dude-ish comedies before transitioning to drama (and wound up rewarded with two Oscar nominations). It helps that Hill is also Scorsese-adjacent, thanks to his turn as the repugnant, lude-guzzling swindler Donnie Azoff in The Wolf of Wall Street.

He plays another such gent in War Dogs: Diveroli, a too-tanned arms dealer who sucks Packouz, an old friend and underpaid massage therapist, into his shady dealings. Miles Teller plays Packouz, narrating the madness from a script by Phillips, Stephen Chin and Jason Smilovic. Goodfellas comparisons abound. You half expect him to say, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gun runner.”

Together, Diveroli and Packouz secure a $US300 million contract to arm the Afghan military, following relatively small-time gigs providing the Yanks with Berettas. To pull off the job – at a profit – they get into bed with the shady Henry Girard, who promises them an entire artillery in Albania.

There, Packouz confronts some difficult questions: like, is it actually illegal to repackage expired Chinese bullets and resell them with a mark-up? Should he tell his girlfriend, Iz (Ana de Armas), how he’s actually making his money? And can he even trust the greedy Diveroli to not cut him out – or get him killed?

Miles Teller is struggling mightily here, as our Ray Liotta stand-in. He’s better served by roles in which he has to mask smug sociopathy, like Whiplash. I don’t know if this one-time up-and-comer is equipped to play any movie’s moral center. We’re meant to think Packouz is being swept up by this wild ride, but, ultimately, would rather be home with girlfriend and baby; except, he never looks delighted, or that he hasn’t done far worse privately.

It’s Jonah Hill, however, who keeps getting better with age. His Efraim Diveroli, armed most dangerously with a destabilising giggle and a moral deadness, keeps threatening to go full-Pesci at any minute. Underneath, he hints at a lonely, desperate core; a dependency that Teller’s preoccupied Packouz can’t fulfil.

Hill’s Diveroli just wants someone to bro old with.

Thing is, successfully emulating Martin Scorsese does not mean simply deploying the right musical sting at the mostly right moment. It’s not even about cinematography so rich, you can barely distinguish it from any other prestige picture. (Phillips and his DOP, Lawrence Sher, to their credit, have always manipulated the colour temperature of their projects with great skill, as if they were making Traffic.)

There’s no real interrogation of the characters or the industries (legal and otherwise) in which they thrived - just a lot of posturing. That doesn’t make this an empty satire; just an ineffective and unmemorable one. Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street knew when to revel in the perks and when to reveal the cost. War Dogs only knows how to shoot a daylight kidnapping at the right Kelvin.

It’s like ordering Martin Scorsese and getting… repackaged Todd Phillips.

2.5/5

In cinemas July 19. Rated M for mature themes, violence, sexual references, coarse language and drug use.