IT’S A LONG WAY DOWN
THESE DAYS, DEPRAVITY HAS NEVER BEEN MADE TO LOOK SO GRAND
War Dogs confirms it, if it wasn’t obvious already: we have a new de- rigueur template for American dramas of a certain breed, the kind with A- list marquee talent and $40-million budgets and aspirations toward acclaim, and the template is The Wolf of Wall Street.
This is the fashion now. You take some outrageous, larger- than- life true story, some glamorously criminal escapade, preferably one a glossy magazine has already written up and given shape to, and you just whoop it up, wallowing in the profligacy and decadence with a wink that says you’re skewering it.
Look at all this depravity and vice! Madness. Throw in an upbeat rise- to- power montage and a few platitudes about the American Dream, and voila: prestige picture. If you can seem to credibly reprove the status quo while your millionaire hero inhales a six-inch line of cocaine off the toned gluteus maximus of a supermodel, all the better.
The outrageous, largerthan- life true story in this case is about a pair of boorish entrepreneurial milquetoasts from Miami named Efraim Diveroli and David Packouz, whose exploits furnishing the U.S. military with discount munitions during the War on Terror was duly chronicled by the reporter Guy Lawson in an article for Rolling Stone. In the movie they’re played by Jonah Hill and Miles Teller, and they’re characterized as the sort of directionless plebeian dreamers whose sudden ascent to the stratosphere we can handily imagine as ours.
They sell bullets and berettas on the Internet and strike it rich, and proceed to drink champagne, snort mounds of blow and buy the kinds of palatial oceanfront homes you typically only see in Michael Mann films. All the while, they seem totally awestruck: like can you believe this is happening to a couple of guys like us? Then of course the other shoe drops, and our Icarian heroes begin their predestined fall.
The American Dream. So precarious. Who would have thought?
This is a classic “too far” scenario, as in, “how far will they go? Too far?” It’s the rule of such scenarios that they must. And so light fraught of the doctored- paperwork variety begets deals on the wrong side of the law, which in turn begets the violation of national arms embargos and all manner of other transgressions, each more precipitous than the last.
For the sake of what you might call conventional moral calculus, one of our two heroes, Packouz, has been burdened with a conscience, which impels him to spend a lot of time grimacing and saying things like, “I can’t believe we’re doing this” and “Is this legal?” A more serious movie, a morally serious movie, wouldn’t extent a reprobate cretin like Packouz such transparent clemency, which is just a lame attempt to make a repugnant man plausibly likeable. War Dogs is too spineless to commit to the ferocity demanded by the material. Packouz gets an easy out. Oh, sure, he ran guns — but he wasn’t such a bad guy!
Todd Phillips, director of such legendarily steely films as School for Scoundrels and Starsky & Hutch, doesn’t quite have it in him to satirize, needless to say. For one thing he’s much too enamoured with bawdy humour and un-P.C. cliche to lampoon his heroic doofuses, whose racist broadsides in the Middle East are meant to be a parody of The Ugly American, but end up just plain ugly. A real satirist of American entitlement and excess, like Paul Verhoeven, takes an appealing thing, amplifies it, and then rubs the audience’s noses in it, until whatever it is — patriotism, debauchery, movie violence — seems utterly abhorrent. Phillips prefers to simply lap it all up.
When Hi l l , lavishly bedizzened in a Gucci scarf and Lacoste shades, test-fires an AK- 47 behind an Albanian munitions depot, roaring with glee in slow-motion, you don’t feel the unblinking righteous stare of a director taking excoriating a loathsome knave. You feel the vicarious juvenile relish of an imbecile in communion. Ω