COMEDY GETS THE BULLET
...as Jonah Hill and his The Hangover pals swap the booze gags for 100million rounds of ammunition – in a gripping thriller about a pair of pot-smoking gun-runners
When it comes to film, preconceptions can be a dangerous thing. I mean, stick Miles Teller and, particularly, Jonah Hill on your poster, along with the words ‘from the director of The Hangover’ and pretty much everybody will be expecting a comedy. So much so that when the subsequent film opens with Teller’s character being hauled from a car boot, given a thorough kicking and then having a pistol shoved in his face, I was still half-expecting Hill to leap out from behind a pile of East European rubble to deliver some sort of comic punchline.
But it never happens because, it turns out, War Dogs is not a comedy at all; in fact it’s a drama, albeit a drama with funny moments every now and again.
Any naive assumption that it also might resemble something truthful because it bears the stamp ‘based on a true story’ is similarly misplaced. It doesn’t take very much research to discover that characters have been omitted, incidents invented and storylines improved, leaving us with a film that is not the comedy we’re expecting nor the account we might be hoping for.
What a good job, then, that it’s well acted – particularly by Hill – cleverly written and exposes a brilliant example of the law of unintended consequences. For in the wake of the second Gulf War, US Congress made a little-noticed change to the way that US defence contracts were awarded, to stop the big corporations getting everything and encourage small businesses to have a go.
What was never intended, however, was that among those going after these multi-million-dollar arms contracts would be two twentysomething pot-heads from Miami, David Packouz (Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Hill). But that is exactly what happened.
The story is narrated by Packouz, who – as the film begins, in 2004 – is 22, a part-time massage therapist and trying to make his fortune by selling cotton sheets to Florida’s myriad care homes. The only problem is that Florida’s care homes think nice sheets are wasted on old leathery bodies.
So when his old school friend Diveroli rolls back into town from Los Angeles, there’s an entrepreneurial hole in his life just waiting to be filled. The only problem is that his old friend’s new business is, er, guns.
‘This isn’t about being pro-war,’ flannels Diveroli, ‘it’s about being pro-money.’ Which is why he’s set up his own company, AEY, why he relentlessly monitors the public website on which, amazingly, every US defence contract is offered, and why he wants David to join him as his partner.
And so it begins – a small contract here, another there before the boys move on to shipping Berettas to Baghdad and then the big one, a $300million contract to re-equip the new Afghan army, an order that includes 100million rounds of AK-47 ammunition. Surely they’re going to have to leave that one to the big boys? No?
Given that the motor-mouthed Diveroli is a born conman and that the film itself, as director and co-writer Todd Phillips cheerfully admits, is manipulating the truth, there’s the constant feeling that we shouldn’t necessarily believe what we’re seeing. But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it. So while in real life the boys never smuggled guns into Iraq in a rickety old truck, there’s no doubt that’s the sequence that gets the film up and running.
Nevertheless, the not-unenjoyable feeling that it could well be us who are being conned never quite goes away, particularly once Bradley Cooper (who also co-produces) arrives as a top arms-dealer.
As the essentially likeable but easily led Packouz, Teller provides our way into the story, playing a slightly naive young man who can’t quite believe his own luck. ‘Is it legal?’ he asks nervously, as yet another deal
There’s a feeling that we shouldn’t believe what we’re seeing, but it doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy it
seems too good to be true. ‘It’s not illegal,’ is the reply, an answer we’re pretty sure sooner or later won’t entirely be true. But if Teller is essentially playing the low-key everyman, it’s the larger-than-life Hill who so impressively provides the story’s rotten but hugely watchable core. When he’s working in straight drama, he tends to play unpleasant characters – as in The Wolf Of Wall Street – and, as such, his performance as the debauched, boorish and totally unprincipled Diveroli is one of his best yet.
Without Hill’s scene-stealing performance, War Dogs would be lacking in both punch and drive. We want this dishonest, queue-barging, sexist pig to get his comeuppance, so we engage with the often far-fetched story, desperate to find out how it finally arrives.
Despite its narrative vagaries and embellishments, War Dogs does shine an illuminating light on the extraordinary practical economics of modern warfare, economics that can see an AK47 bullet be manufactured in communist China and stored for decades in Cold War Albania, only to be fired in anger on the bloodsoaked plains of Afghanistan. Now that’s a lot more insightful than your average Jonah Hill movie.