Review: War Inc.

A hamfisted John Cusack vehicle from some of the folks that brought you Grosse Pointe Blank, this second go around with the hitman with a heart of bronze and angsty romantic issues, is more than a bit of a bust. Call it Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine for dummies - it seems like the writers read the book and thought they’d preach the message to the slowest folks in the room. Heck, call it Fierce Creatures, as that Cleese-Palin-Curtis-Kline ‘comedy’ is the modern template of failing to follow up to a fun contemporary classic.

The story follows Brand Hauser, en route from an assassination in the Canadian territories to a small Middle eastern country, recently bombed into submission by the USA, where he has to knock off the local oil baron who is building a pipeline which is not in the economic interest of ex-Vice President and now CEO of a Halliburton/BlackWater-esque corporation (Dan Aykroyd, going for Dick Cheney and displaying none of the peppy charms of GPB’s Grocer. The best War Inc. can come up with for him is a hoary Fat Bastard poop joke). His cover is as the producer of a tradeshow which is inviting American corporations into the rebuilding efforts of the countries infrastructure. This ill conceived high-profile cover puts him in the position on having to deal with the embedded reporters in the Green Zone (that is when they are not doing their reporting from the corporations ‘Disneyland Motion Ride’ virtual war viewer) as well as the trade-show’s razzle-dazzle wedding of an Asian pop-tart (a surprisingly good Hillary Duff in beige-face as Yonica Babyyeah) to the son of the same targeted oil-Baron Hauser is there to terminate. Although running the show does provide an excellent excuse for sister Joan Cusack to reprise her ‘harried secretary’ role albeit this time with none of the charm.

Much like Grosse Pointe Blank, an assassination plot is fused with a romantic comedy, which ends up as the greater focus of the film, expect that this one fizzles out simply because it gives the female lead, Marissa Tomei, precious little to do except confirm to the audience that she is way above this - she almost does for War Inc. what did with the thankless role in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. More embarassing is John Cusack who gets double duty as star and co-writer and giving the impression that he would rather fall back on an old crutch, the sadsack looking-for-something-more hitman. Mr. Cusack has not had a good movie since 2000’s High Fidelity, and if the mediocre 1408 was a badly fumbled attempt to remake Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining with a modern sensibility, then War Inc. is an equally failed attempt to update the nihilistic-absurdity of Dr. Strangelove.

Director Joshua Seftel is certainly no George Armitage (who brought the good to GPB and also directed the criminally underseen Alec Baldwin dead-pan comedy Miami Blues). Seftel is more in love with referencing Kubrick, conceptually, visually and musically, than telling any sort of structured or modulated narrative or even a worthwhile character to cling to. Blame the screenplay too, which has trouble finding its own voice amongst the mimicry of better films. For the mayhem of something like Doomsday (a film from earlier this year that re-hashes several other genre noteworthys) that approach can be inspired, for the delicate and precision strikes necessary for good satire, the approach is crippling. Instead of going for Kubrick, perhaps should have watched Wag The Dog or Three Kings a few more times to see how a structured script that eschews ‘big surprise moments’ is perhaps a better approach than cluttered Southland Tales model (a film War Inc. has in common both in advertisement branded tanks and contemporary pop singers in significant roles; and further similarity in going from an intimate and human-scaled first film (Donnie Darko) to an overreaching scope with the second.) Like that film, there are a few genuinely interesting sight-gags such as the disaster capitalist gift-bag or the scramble-screen celebrity-encryption technique for the mysterious Viceroy.

Ben Kingsley makes the most embarassing appearance as Sexy Beast’s Don Logan with a dreadful Yankee accent to provide a backstory for Hauser’s mid-life moral crisis. And daytime talkshow host Montel Williams has the good sense not to show his face replacing Alan Arkin as the beleaguered therapist who in War Inc. is some sort of hybrid of K.I.T.T. and OnStar, existing as a swirl of light that dispenses advice between telling Hauser to make a right at Greenland in his private jet. If I’m belaboring the comparisons to Grosse Pointe Blank here, it is simply because they map so distinctly over top of War Inc. that they are impossible to ignore in the same way That Ivan Reitman’s Evolution was impossible not to compare to the far superior Ghost Busters.

Corporate profiteering in modern warfare is a subject ripe for satire for a smarter film than War Inc. And grafting on background to a romantic comedy of sorts makes the whole affair an ill conceived, gangly beast that deserves its place in the DVD bargain bin of failed John Cusack films (perhaps they should have attempted to loosely re-envision One Crazy Summer?). Go find Gregor Jordan’s Buffalo Soldiers, a modern war satire with similar aims that is more deserving of your attention, and/or read the Naomi Klein tell-all if you are looking for truly depressing tragi-comedy of the modern age. And let War Inc. quietly file for bankruptcy.