Todd Phillips’s true story of two Miami twentysomethings who sold bullets to the Pentagon has one first-rate performance, Jonah Hill’s, and a director who has watched The Wolf of Wall Street closely and learned the wrong things from it.
Todd Phillips, who made the three Hangover films, has found a true story that looks like one of his comedies and is not. In 2005 two men barely out of their teens, David Packouz (Miles Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), started bidding on small Pentagon arms contracts from Miami Beach and ended up with a deal to arm the Afghan National Army. War Dogs has the rise, mostly on the strength of Hill, and fumbles the fall, because Phillips cannot decide whether he finds these two appalling or wonderful and settles for finding them funny.
The set-up is the best of it. Teller’s David is massaging rich men and failing to sell bedsheets to nursing homes when Efraim, a friend from school, turns up at a funeral wearing a gold chain and plainly making more money than anyone there. His company, AEY, bids on the government’s own website for the crumbs the big defence firms will not stoop to, and Hill explains it with the patience of a man who has enjoyed every telling. The first Iraq run, a truck of pistols driven from Jordan to Baghdad because an embargo stopped them flying, is a proper set piece, and we were gripped until a song came up under the arrival and we realised the film wanted a cheer.
Hill is the reason to see it. He has given Efraim a soft, high, wheezing laugh that arrives a beat late, a paunch he carries like a badge, and a Scarface poster he quotes as if it were advice. He lets us see the arithmetic behind the eyes for a fraction of a second before the smile covers it. We laughed at that laugh every time, and by the third time we had stopped liking ourselves for it, which is the closest the film comes to the effect it is after. Teller, as narrator and conscience, is stuck being reasonable while the other man does the acting. The film never makes David’s own greed interesting, and a rise and fall needs two people falling.
Lawrence Sher shoots Miami in hard, bleached sunlight and hotel-lobby gold, and Iraq and Albania in a dustier version of the same, so the war looks like a hotter Miami. Bill Brzeski’s AEY office grows from a strip-mall room with a cardboard box for a desk to a suite with glass walls and a gun safe. Cliff Martinez’s electronic score is cool and low and mostly unused, because Phillips would rather drop a song, and the songs are the ones every film about young men and money has already used. Jeff Groth cuts to them in montages of counting cash and packing crates, and the montages are where the film goes to avoid writing a scene.
What is missing is a point of view. The chapter cards quote the characters’ own lines back at us, the voiceover tells us that war is an economy, and the camera cannot stop admiring the pool parties. Phillips has studied The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), which let its hero seduce us and then made us pay for it; here nobody pays for anything except in the plot. The Albania stretch treats a country as a punchline about bad hotels. Bradley Cooper turns up in dark glasses as Henry Girard, an arms dealer on a watch list, and gives the film its only real menace. Ana de Armas, as Iz, is asked to be pregnant, disappointed and forgiving in that order, and does all three with more grace than the writing earns.
The second half takes the turn the true story took, and we will not describe it, except to say that it turns the film into a thriller about a phone call. Against Phillips’s own record it is a step forward: his first film to notice that the boys’ weekend has consequences. Against Andrew Niccol’s Lord of War (2005), which was angrier and clumsier and knew exactly what it thought of its arms dealer, it looks undecided.
Watch it for Hill, for the first hour and for the Jordan road. It runs 114 minutes and carries a 15, and at home it plays as what it is: a decent Saturday-night crime comedy that read one good magazine article and thought it had read a book.
