Anti-war satire that deserves to tank
War Machine 15 Cert, 122min
Dir: David Michôd; Starring: Brad Pitt, Scoot Mcnairy, Anthony Hayes, John Magaro, Anthony Michael Hall, Emory Cohen, Topher Grace, Daniel Betts, Will Poulter, Lakeith Stanfield, Ben Kingsley, Meg Tilly
Many of us critics have been taken aback by the strength of feeling against the streaming service Netflix from France’s cinema establishment at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. If they had seen War Machine, it might have been easier to understand. The highest-profile Netflix original feature to date launches on the online platform worldwide today – and, to put it mildly, it’s hard to picture a less promising foray into film-making.
Netflix’s modus operandi has been to pair brand-name stars (in this case, Brad Pitt) with risk-taking directors (Australia’s David Michôd, of Animal Kingdom and The Rover) and more or less allow them to get on with it. The result here has been a dreary and flatulent anti-war satire that already feels like an irrelevant relic from the Obama era. In it, Pitt plays Gen Glenn Mcmahon, a fictionalised version of real-life general, Stanley Mcchrystal, the trouble-shooter called in to thrash Afghanistan into shape in 2009.
Cue lots of Pitt purposefully striding to loud music, flanked by meatheads, though not a great deal of actual war. He says the US Army will prevail due to the “unassailable might and power of our ideals”, though it’s never clear that Mcmahon actually believes this.
In fact, it’s hard to fathom what the character thinks about anything, let alone extract a satirical critique of modern warfare from his antics. Pitt has played eccentric, hard-bitten army men before – not least in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and David Ayer’s Fury. But his Mcmahon is an unintelligible bundle of hollow rhetoric and clownish tics who spends the entire film waddling like a chimpanzee with a congenital squint and a mouthful of walnuts. (He also looks around 10 years too young, even though at 53, he’s roughly the same age as Mcchrystal was at the time.)
There is much panicky strategising with arrows on whiteboards in the style of Dr. Strangelove – first in Afghanistan and later Berlin, where Mcmahon attempts to stir support for a counterinsurgency troop surge while catching up with his wife (Meg Tilly).
And, every so often, Ben Kingsley pops up as a Mr Bean-like version of the Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
Throughout most of this, a sardonic narrator pokes fun and is identified around halfway into the film as a journalist (Scoot Mcnairy) who is writing a profile of Mcmahon that will eventually lead to his resignation. (A piece that Michael Hastings wrote for Rolling Stone – which he later expanded into the book on which War Machine is based – had the same effect on Gen Mcchrystal’s career.)
The inexplicable delay in bringing this journalist-narrator on screen deprives the viewer of the context needed to make sense of the voiceover’s partisan, snickering tone: for around an hour, it just feels as if the film is jeering at itself. And it’s hard to take lectures on alpha-male hubris from a film with such an unwarranted swagger in its step.