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.
There must be something about her red-head, ethereal complexion that inspires directors to maximize a hermetically sealed feeling about the roles she has played. Diseased women (or women surrounded by disease), slightly unhinged and smart women on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Heck, even in a quirky over-the-top comedy like The Big Lebowski her mod-cut feminist boarding school accent/demeanor gives off the impression that she doesn’t go outside in the sunshine much, prescribing a physician with the efficient and ask-no-questions manner of, “He’s a good man. And thorough.”
So is it really surprising that in the upcoming disease epidemic, Fernando Meirelles adaptation of the prize winning novel Blindness that Moore is smack dab in the middle of disease ridden misery? Todd Haynes made her ‘allergic to the 20th century’ in Safe, perhaps the ultimate of the fragile roles that she has ever played. Where a simple nosebleed in a hair salon comes across as the monster reveal in Alien. Or for that matter a hacking cough while driving behind a smoke-belching cube-van is played out like a thriller set-piece. 
Then P.T. Anderson, in Magnolia, a few years later would cast her as a pill popping, woefully high-strung trophy wife who is working her way (badly) through the slow cancerous death of her rich husband, who she has actually fallen in love with after her initial play for his money, and feels the crush weight of strange guilt threatening to snuff her out. An offhand (and perhaps slightly out-of-line) comment from the pharmacist while picking up a prescription sets her off in a fit of frustrated Tourettes-expressed rage. Anderson also made good use of bravado and fragility in her turn as porn-actress Amber Waves in Boogie Nights where her character’s drug-fueled lifestyle prevents her from getting custody of her child. A memorable thread in the film is the downward spiral at being denied her own offspring and her surrogate mothering of another damaged sex-starlet.
On a similar note, Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men sees Ms. Moore struggling in a near future world with the death of her son, and her inability (along with the rest of the female population) to have children. While she is undeniably a strong-willed woman and revolutionary leader in the film, her unwillingness to acknowledge the past with her former husband (and father of the dead child) strikes as a vulnerability in common with the rest of her genetic/disease/pharmaceutical hampered characters.
I’ll stretch my argument razor thin that even in conventional big studio films such as Steven Spielberg’s geneticists-gone-wild sci-fi action picture Jurassic Park II, Ivan Reitman’s riff on his own Ghostbusters – the alien mutating comedy/action picture Evolution, the aptly named ghost-thriller Forgotten and the even more forgettable Hannibal where Moore was woefully miscast considering the previous stories growth of the character (played then to an academy award by Jodie Foster); although her proximity to all manner of mentally diseased men suggest (at least on paper) otherwise. This smattering of examples all play to one degree or another off vulnerabilities which make-up artists have had a field day with Moore’s pale complexion.
Is Julianne Moore capable of more than just a person rotting from within and surrounded by disease or wonky genetics? Of course. Her turn in Far From Heaven is sublime as the housewife challenging the political perceptions around her. She shone as the wily villain in the 1999′s adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play An Ideal husband, as well in the overlooked The Shipping News as a Newfoundlander single mother. But personally, her more memorable roles (including an unmentioned -until now- turn in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts) express a fragility of body and spirit, or one hiding behind a brave exterior. Here is hoping that one of the current top-shelf actors of today keeps playing different spins on this theme. She shines a flickering light through a darkened multiplex, simultaneously stubborn and tentatively wavering.
