The strange dog daze of war
Director and stars take liberties with this quasi-true combat tale
It’s hard when you are playing a guy who is hurting a lot of people and deceiving a lot of people.
War Dogs stars Jonah Hill and Miles Teller are sort of brothers in arms in one of the oddest movie stories ever told.
Loosely based on Guy Lawson’s 2011 news feature and book Arms and the Dudes, the Todd Phillips comedy-drama features Hill and Teller as the dudes, 20-something slackers who become arms dealers.
That happens when the U. S. government permits small businesses to bid on military contracts.
They enter the contest and eventually win a few deals, but quickly get in over their heads. Filmed at multiple locations in Morocco, Romania, Jordan, Los Angeles and Miami, the movie combines fictional action with lots of factual situations profiling their rise and fall.
For Phillips, the filmmaker behind the Hangover trilogy, the tone’s a change of pace, but he still has fun with the outlandish premise.
“Nobody knows who they are, so we took a lot of liberties,” the director said.
Preview audiences seemed to agree that War Dogs showcases a deft blend of comedy and drama defined by Hill and Teller, and shaped by Phillips.
Meanwhile, only Teller was able to meet with his real-life counterpart, David Packouz, who has a cameo in the film singing the song (Don’t Fear) The Reaper to residents at a home for senior citizens.
It’s a Phillips idea, one of many sequences underscoring the bizarre nature of the story. That’s why he needed Teller’s character to ground the plot as the quasinarrator.
“I always wanted to work with Todd,” said Teller, who co-starred in the Phillips-produced movie Project X.
“And then throw in Jonah.”
In fact, Hill and Teller didn’t have a great deal of time to bond before filming began in Miami, but they both agree shooting in multiple locations brought them together quickly. And Teller says portraying somebody “aimless and directionless” seems easily relatable.
“For me, it didn’t seem all that long ago,” he says. “And I was really interested in the friendship dynamic.”
Hill went to darker places to play his greedy sociopath con-artist capable of almost any deceit.
“I was really bummed out playing this guy,” Hill says.
“It’s hard when you are playing a guy who is hurting a lot of people and deceiving a lot of people.”
In a more positive way, he says his War Dogs character has something in common with his stats expert in the baseball movie Moneyball and his shifty fund manager in The Wolf of Wall Street
“They are all trying to figure a way into something new,” Hill says.
“It’s a way into something by finding a loophole or an avenue into something different.”
Despite the characters’ differences, the “dudes” do have something in common.
“They didn’t have much to lose and they had bravado and a little bit of ignorance,” Teller says.