War Dogs (R16)

War Dogs stars Jonah Hill and Miles Teller as, improbably, arms dealers in their mid-20s making dodgy deals between corrupted war-torn countries and the United States military. It’s not awful; it just isn’t any good. And this is disappointing – not because

War Dogs is by the director of The Hangover (a man with such comedy chops has no place trying to branch out into drama, as demonstrated by his casting of an over-bronzed, giggling Hill). It’s a shame because it’s based on a true story (published in a Rolling Stone article) and that tale is so fantastical you’d expect the screenwriter’s job had been half done for him. It wants so badly to be

Goodfellas; from voice-over to freeze-frames, it copies every Scorsese-ism in the book, but is doomed by an underwritten, lacklustre, and at times banal, script. ‘‘Chapters’’ are punctuated by self-explanatory quotations, while the bursts of delight-inducing songs (from House of Pain to the Beastie Boys to, um, UB40) feel like a manipulative cover up of how lame the actual movie is beneath. By the end it’s clear, War Dogs is trying to be a Wolf

of Wall Street, but while its protagonists’ morals don’t sink to quite those levels of depravity and excess, War

Dogs simply lacks the panache of Scorsese’s darkest hour, and to that end isn’t even fun to watch in a guilty pleasure sort of way. – 114 mins