BANGS
Joker Jonah has Iraq War in his
THE trailer suggests this is a comedy – a gun-toting Hangover about stoners stumbling into global arms dealing.
But despite a peppering of gags, it’s really a morality tale, taking a sniper’s aim at the unbridled greed of the American dream.
Director Todd Phillips isn’t using the raucous formula he established with Road Trip, Old School and his three Hangover movies.
This time he’s working to a very different template – the rags-toriches yarns of Scorsese’s Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street.
Loosely based on an article in Rolling Stone magazine, it tells the story of two twentysomethings who find themselves out of their depth during George W Bush’s war in Iraq.
Jonah Hill plays Efraim, a socipathic chancer who discovers a portal to untold riches on a government website.
In the mid-2000s, in order to deflect criticism of profiteering and cronyism, a deadly version of eBay was launched.
By clicking on a list of military hardware, anyone could bid to supply the new Iraqi armed forces with guns, ammo and explosives.
Efraim calls his company AEY (which like him, stands for nothing whatsoever) and begins “feeding off scraps” – acting as a middle-man for the smallest contracts. But after GRIZZLED TV detective Mike Hammer made Stacy Keach one of the biggest stars of the early 80s.
But when he was arrested in 1984 for cocaine possession at Heathrow Airport, he feared he would never work again.
However, after spending six months in Reading Prison, the actor kicked drugs and bounced back. Now American History X, The Bourne Legacy and Nebraska have made him one of the most sought after character actors in Hollywood.
On Friday, audiences can see the 75-yearold battling zombies with John Cusack and Samuel L Jackson in Cell, a sci-fi action movie based on a Stephen King novel. I caught up with Stacy to talk about the film and his recently published autobiography All In All. recruiting his old schoolmate and bong partner Dave (Miles Teller), things quickly escalate.
Bigger deals lead to flashier apartments, faster cars and greater risks.
They pay off until they snag a $300million dollar deal to supply AK-47 ammo to the Iraqi army. The bullets are cheap but clearly Chinese.
To beat a US embargo they find themselves tangled in a hare-brained scheme involving an Albanian warehouse, cardboard boxes and Bradley Cooper’s shadowy fixer. There’s a great scene where they must hotfoot it over to Jordan to smuggle Italian pistols across the border through Iraq’s “triangle of death”. Here Phillips hits on the perfect tone. It’s tense, unpredictable and thanks to Hill, disgracefully funny. Like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, Efraim sends our moral compass spinning. We want to disapprove of him, but he’s too entertaining. Sadly, Teller doesn’t fare quite as well. Dave is meant to be the audience surrogate – a good guy who gets sucked in to provide for his girlfriend and their new baby.
But Phillips lets him off the hook too easily. Scorsese would have had him, like us, seduced by the money, danger and power. Here, he’s too upstanding to believe in.
The rock music, freeze frames and voice-over make it feel like a Scorsese movie but that edge is missing.
It’s an entertaining yarn that hits its target. But the bomb never goes off. Q: You’ve worked with some great actors over the years…