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war dogs movie review

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"War Dogs" is a film about horrible people that refuses to own the horribleness. It's too enamored with its glib arms dealer heroes, and although it's packed with scenes that might have inspired moral whiplash in works like " Scarface ," " Goodfellas " and " The Wolf of Wall Street "—to name three superb films about guys who get equally high on drugs and the adrenaline rush of living outside the law, and that "War Dogs" references constantly—they're always softened by Hollywood special pleading: Aren't these guys adorable and funny? Don't you love what good friends they are? Don't you admire their audacity? Look at how troubled the hero seems—don't you feel for him?  

Director and co-writer Todd Phillips (the "Hangover" trilogy) would seem to be an ideal, or at least promising, person to tell this tale of a couple of pipsqueak Miami arms dealers who make a fortune providing guns and bullets to the US military during the height of the Bush administration's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But "War Dogs," which is based on a Rolling Stone article and a subsequent book by Guy Lawson , lacks the courage of its convictions. Tone-wise, it's all over the map. Sometimes it seems to stare pitilessly at its hero and narrator, former massage therapist and bed sheet dealer turned arms trafficker David Packouz ( Miles Teller ), and his friend and boss Efraim Diveroli ( Jonah Hill ), and recognize them as greedy, expedient men who only care about fattening their bank accounts. But other times it seems inordinately concerned with whether David and Efraim will stay pals once things turn south—as if it's a straightforward, un-ironic buddy flick about badass dudes doing badass things, sometimes in slow-motion, instead of a twisted and conflicted parody of that kind of film. 

Worse, "War Dogs" presents David's barely-developed wife Iz ( Ana de Armas ) as a voice of conscience who's horrified by her husband's lies and furtiveness, never anything more. Whenever the movie concentrates on Iz and David's marriage problems, it confirms its softness. Every time it asks us to care deeply about whether David will lose Iz—who chastises David for his dishonesty, then supports him, then turns against him again, always according to the needs of the plot at that moment—it exposes its sweet-creamy Hollywood center. Henry and Karen Hill these two ain't. 

Scorsese's "Wolf of Wall Street," which costarred Jonah Hill, drew critical fire (like "Goodfellas" and "Scarface" before it) for making its wheeler-dealer protagonists as fun to watch as they were morally repulsive; but that was part of the movie's design, and whether you thought Scorsese and writer Terence Winter succeeded or failed, it was obvious that you were supposed to feel torn about the characters and question if you should be having fun watching them get over. It was a variation on the gangster film attraction-repulsion strategy, where you share the hero's power trip fantasy and then feel the sting of reality slapping him in the face. "War Dogs" keeps the Scorsesean arrogant-macho banter (which can be very funny, thanks to the relaxed interplay between Hill and Teller) but it loses the ugly undertow that makes non-sociopathic viewers feel slightly dirty for feeling so excited. The detailed breakdowns of the fine points of arms deals come across as a guns-and-ammo version of hedge fund guys bragging about a haul.

The choice of storyteller is a big part of the film's problem. David, whose real-life equivalent served as a technical advisor and has a cameo, is depicted as nearly as big of a blank as his poor wife. He's a nice guy who was just going about his business when Satan showed up in the form of Efraim, rather than a quick study who ditched his two day jobs and within a matter of weeks was able to manage a soon-to-be-multimillion dollar business built on Beretta pistols and AK-47 shells bought on the cheap and shipped into war zones. 

The best thing about "War Dogs" is the characterization of Efraim, as embodied by Hill. This actor portrays blobby, sarcastic, volatile men better than anyone since the late, great Chris Penn , and he's terrific here, using the character's squeaky laugh as an exclamation point at the end of a tense moment, and letting us see the calculations happening in Efraim's reptilian brain by letting his eyes go cloudy. There are moments where you can spot the exact moment when Efraim decides to betray or destroy someone; often the moment occurs when Efraim is insisting that he's all about loyalty and trust. If "War Dogs" had put Efraim at its center, it might have gotten closer to its apparent wish to be a scathing, Scorsesean take on arms dealing during the War on Terror—half madcap comedy, half expose. At the very least, it would have inoculated itself against claims that it's a safe film on a dangerous subject. Efraim is a slobbish but confident con artist who trudges through life in baggy leisure wear and expensive sunglasses, puffing up his ego with money and guns and telling David, "I'm not pro-war. The war is happening. This [business] is pro-money." At one point he even describes himself to an Iraqi as an "ugly American," frankly claiming a stereotype that he knows he embodies from head to toe. 

You get the sense that Efraim knows full well what he is but has decided not to worry about it, a scenario that's considerably more chilling than all the scenes of David worrying that Efraim has gone too far but is too good a friend to abandon. Every time Efraim appears onscreen, the audience and the movie have to reckon with him. But "War Dogs" chooses instead to hang on David and take his exculpatory narration at face value, as if both Phillips and the audience are as gullible as Iz. 

Phillips knowingly cites "Goodfellas" through various formal techniques (chatty narration, scary-funny violence, freeze-frames) to the point where you pretty much have to buy the idea that David is a twenty-something, 21st century Henry Hill. But "War Dogs" doesn't have the bravura visuals and electrifying coldness of Scorsese in gangster-scumbag mode. And you never get the sense, as you do in the best narrated Scorsese films, that the narrator is shading things to make himself seem more glamorous, or less culpable in horror than he actually was (as exemplified in the "Goodfellas" scene where Hill calmly describes the ramifications of a mob footsoldier killing a waiter on a whim, but the movie shows us closeups of the character looking appalled and distressed). 

"War Dogs," in contrast, wants us to take David at face value, as a nice guy who made a few mistakes and got in way over his head before coming to his senses but is still basically decent. In the end, he comes off as guilty mainly of loving and trusting his friend, and there's hardly anything in the film to suggest that this might not be the whole story. Efraim, meanwhile, comes across as more of an outrageous, hot-tempered clown than a grubby visionary pig whose lack of education and refinement are eclipsed by a predator's cunning. The film turns him into glorified comic relief, so funny that he can't be properly frightening. Most of the characters in the first "Hangover" seemed more disreputable and unpredictable than this guy, and Phillips seemed not to care if we liked them as long as we found them funny and interesting; here he wants us to like his slimy people, too—or at least the film wants us to like David, and root for him to stay friends with Efraim and win back Iz's love. It's a brief in David's defense that sometimes plays as if it was written by David himself. 

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

War Dogs movie poster

War Dogs (2016)

Rated R for language throughout, drug use and some sexual references.

114 minutes

Miles Teller as David Packouz

Jonah Hill as Efraim Diveroli

Ana de Armas as Iz

Barry Livingston as Army Bureaucrat

  • Todd Phillips

Writer (based on the Rolling Stone article "Arms and the Dudes")

  • Jason Smilovic
  • Stephen Chin

Cinematographer

  • Lawrence Sher
  • Cliff Martinez

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Review: ‘War Dogs,’ an Absurd (and True) Gunrunning Tale

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war dogs movie review

By Neil Genzlinger

  • Aug. 18, 2016

“Based on a true story,” the movie “War Dogs” says, and indeed it is. Which proves conclusively that truth is stranger than fiction.

The film , a comic drama, is about two school chums who are reacquainted in their 20s and, improbably, become arms suppliers to the United States military. One of them, David ( Miles Teller ), is a reluctant recruit into a business begun by the other, Efraim (Jonah Hill), who has discovered a world of Pentagon contracts just waiting for bids.

The story is told from David’s perspective, but this is Efraim’s show, and Mr. Hill’s movie. Efraim lives large and does business fearlessly, acting as a middleman between weapons suppliers and the military in deals that get bigger and bigger, until both he and David are in over their heads.

It’s an alarming way for the American military to arm itself and its allies, worthy of an exposé, but Todd Phillips, the director here, is mining the absurdity more than the outrage. He delivers an entertaining tale, especially when one or both men have to travel from their home base in Florida to overseas hot spots to correct their ineptitude.

Mr. Teller and Mr. Hill aren’t a completely convincing pair — sometimes David seems gullible enough to be taken in by Efraim, and other times he seems too smart — and Efraim’s “Scarface” obsession is played for one joke too many, but this is a movie you don’t want to think too hard about. It’s August; just enjoy the insane ride, which is helped along by Ana de Armas as David’s romantic interest and Bradley Cooper as the pivotal figure in the deal that finally makes the wheels fall off.

NEIL GENZLINGER

“War Dogs” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for drug use and the kind of language used by foul-mouthed gunrunners.

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War Dogs Reviews

war dogs movie review

Jonah Hill delivers one of his best performances

Full Review | Aug 7, 2023

war dogs movie review

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it is also lazily standing on the shoulders of giants. Thats the impact and existence of Todd Phillipss War Dogs in a gun err nutshell.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 8, 2022

war dogs movie review

Plain laziness.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jun 30, 2021

war dogs movie review

With no real spectacle to behold, no strong message or lesson, War Dogs is a bit deflated, though the Hill Teller dynamic duo keeps some life and charm...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 3, 2021

war dogs movie review

You'll go along for the ride.

Full Review | Feb 16, 2021

Tthe whole thing has a breezy, surprisingly low-stakes "isn't the system really at fault here?" feel to it. Which makes War Dogs an enjoyably goofy, if rote, look at the banality of war profiteering.

Full Review | Jan 5, 2021

While I do consider War Dogs one of Todd Phillips' best movies, it could've been a better one if it had something on its mind.

Full Review | Dec 23, 2020

war dogs movie review

There's something intriguing about average guys with desk jobs spontaneously transforming into literal gun runners through war-torn Iraq.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Dec 5, 2020

war dogs movie review

Don't expect anything special or some eye-opening revelation. War Dogs shouldn't come as a surprise. Just enjoy the cautionary tale of this crazy journey and the brilliant performance by Jonah Hill.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 17, 2020

war dogs movie review

War Dogs isn't a game-changer by any definition... but as a calling card for a filmmaker seeking a jump to the big leagues, it demands to be considered. And God bless the deliciously ambiguous ending.

Full Review | Mar 31, 2020

war dogs movie review

Is War Dogs supposed to be a comedy? Some sort of satire? A sobering indictment? Phillips tries to make it all of these things at different points throughout the movie, and the cumulative effect doesn't work.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 23, 2020

war dogs movie review

Thanks to Jonah Hill and Miles Teller, this film, based on a true story, is funny, disgusting, tense, troubling but it's also very watchable.

Full Review | Oct 23, 2019

war dogs movie review

Director Todd Phillips graduates from schtick comedy to more serious subject matter with this film but still manages to interject moments of "slapstick" that remind you of his previous success.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 27, 2019

war dogs movie review

Efraim and David's casual callousness is supposed to be funny... But the uncomfortable truth is that War Dogs, perhaps unconsciously, provides an accurate picture of current US attitudes towards war.

Full Review | Sep 16, 2019

war dogs movie review

Comparable to The Big Short in its appeal, but with a little less meat for financial wonks and a little more weed.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 20, 2019

war dogs movie review

War Dogs struggles a bit with its identity, seemingly unsure whether it wants to be a comedy or a drama and thus winding up in a bit of a muddy middle. Still, the dynamic between [Miles] Teller and [Jonah] Hill goes a long way.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 15, 2019

war dogs movie review

These are some ugly people, doing ugly things for money, and for that "War Dogs" does its job of making the audience see a side of America that surely no one wants to talk about.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jan 15, 2019

war dogs movie review

WAR DOGS is a mixed bag of great lines of snappy dialogue and a couple of truly intense scenes, yet somehow (aside from Jonah Hill) it all seems half-baked with several empty spaces to fill.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | Dec 10, 2018

war dogs movie review

The only reason to see this film is for Jonah Hill's performance. Those are twelve words I never in my life thought I'd say.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/5 | Dec 7, 2018

War Dogs was a much more substantial film than I ever expected from the trailers.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Nov 2, 2018

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Film Review: ‘War Dogs’

With the 'Hangover' trilogy behind him, director Todd Phillips has made his first terrific movie for grown-ups, starring Miles Teller and Jonah Hill in a true-life tale of hip-geek arms dealers.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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War Dogs

“ War Dogs ,” starring Miles Teller and Jonah Hill as bushy-tailed geek scoundrels who become Internet arms salesmen, is that rare thing: a based-in-reality movie that gives you a buzz. The film just about tingles with the antic pleasure of seeing people get away with things they shouldn’t. It’s obvious that the director, Todd Phillips , has been hugely influenced by the money-fever rush and propulsive shot language of Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and by the orchestrated delirium of David O. Russell’s “American Hustle” — giddy, spinning life-as-a-con-job psychodramas that show you how fraud really works, and that celebrate it, too. (They also condemn it, but only after giving the audience a rough and rowdy good time.)

Phillips borrows the bravura of Scorsese and Russell (who borrowed plenty of Scorsese’s to begin with), but he also makes it his own, merging it with his more casually mirthful, next-generation voice. “The Wolf of Wall Street” was rooted in the sleek white-collar façade of life on The Street, and “American Hustle” mined the tacky unreality of ’70s sleaze. “War Dogs” has a scruffier, more lightly disreputable vibe. It’s based on a 2011 Rolling Stone article (by Guy Lawson) called “Arms and the Dudes,” and it’s about hip hucksters who make a mountain of cash selling weapons to the U.S. military during the Iraq War. The joke, at least for a while, is that it’s all perfectly legal, because the business of national security has become…a business. The con is that these two are glorified hacker opportunists who only pretend to run a respectable company. But then, to keep it going, they have to start cutting corners, and once they start they can’t stop, since the money is just too good…

In theory, at least, everyone needs to grow up, but that has never been the case in Hollywood, where a filmmaker can get stuck forever in juvenile overdrive. Arrested development rules because it pays (at least, in the movies), and Todd Phillips, for all his wit and flash and talent, has made it the basis of his brand. Ever since his first comedy, the consciously junky neo-’80s youth bash “Road Trip” (2000), he has never looked back, churning out unabashed throwaways that were sometimes funny (“Old School”) and sometimes not (“Starsky & Hutch”), and becoming a major-league Gen-X voice with the “Hangover” trilogy.

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“War Dogs” marks a key turning point for Phillips. After all these years of yocks, it’s his first true grown-up movie , and it’s a nimble, gripping, and terrific one, with plenty of laughs, only now they’re rooted in the reality of fear, and in behavior that’s authentically scurrilous. Even during his reign as king jester of the animal house, it was always clear that Phillips was a genuine filmmaker, but maybe it took the withering response to not one but two “Hangover” sequels for him to look in the mirror and say: Time to move on. Moviegoers should be glad he did. For Phillips, “War Dogs” marks the launch of what could turn out be an inspiring second-stage career. The box office should prove solid (if not “Hangover” huge), because he remains, at every moment, a rousing entertainer.

The movie puts the audience right on the side of duplicity and sleaze — and that, ironically, is the key to its moral cunning. (It teaches a lesson from the inside out.) In this case, we’re led through a looking glass of financial distress — even though the film is set a decade ago, during the administration of George W. Bush. David Packouz (Teller), in his early twenties, is a Miami Beach college dropout who works as a freelance massage therapist, a job the movie mocks, but only because it’s so wrong for him. (His big dream? To make a killing selling quality bedsheets to retirement homes.) It’s David’s good fortune to attend a funeral, where he runs into Efraim Diveroli (Hill), his middle-school yeshiva buddy. Efraim, with huge jowls and a dead-eyed gleam, looks like a bullfrog — but, in fact, he’s his own breed of reptile. He’ll say anything to anyone, but he always makes it sound as if he’s their hip-hop bro, and he has stumbled onto a money-making scheme that’s based on a piece of “liberal” government policy.

In the mid-2000s, as it came to light that the Bush administration was awarding no-bid defense contracts to conglomerates like Halliburton and Lockheed Martin, pressure mounted to make the Iraq War look a little less like a military-industrial boondoggle. So a decision was made to allow anyone to bid on military contracts. Efraim, a scrounger, has turned this into a business, acting as the middle man to sell combat hardware to the military — not major weapons systems, but what he refers to as “crumbs.” He calls his company AEY (which stands for nothing whatsoever), and he’s got a poster on his office wall of Al Pacino in “Scarface” in full machine-gun-spraying grimace. What that poster tells you is that for Efraim, this isn’t just about the money. It’s about the money, the power, the lure of vicarious aggression. It’s about hawking weapons as a signifier of cajones .

He enlists David to become his partner, and David has to overcome one ethical scruple that, at first, seems relatively minor: He and his fiancé, Iz (Ana de Armas), are against the war. But the moral conundrum at the heart of “War Dogs” starts small and then grows, like a tumor. It’s not just about the politics of war — it’s about the interpersonal worm of lying. (It’s about how military lies and personal lies mesh together.) After a while, Efraim and David stumble onto their first lucrative contract, a deal to sell Beretta handguns to a U.S. officer in Baghdad. But thanks to an Italian ruling forbidding arms shipments to Iraq, there’s only one way to make the deal work: They’ll have to ship the weapons to Jordan, then smuggle the guns across the border themselves. Suddenly, these two armchair weapons warriors have to put their badasses on the line.

Phillips, who kicks the movie along with freeze frames, chewy rock & roll nuggets like Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger,” and chapter headings carved out of the dialogue (“When does telling the truth ever help anybody?”), stages a bravura sequence in which David and Efraim show up in Jordan to execute their mission. Efraim says he doesn’t want to be the “ugly American,” but, in fact, he’s the most hilariously ugly of Americans (Efraim to child translator: “Tell him I’ll give him a hundred bucks for those shades. Tell him in gibberish”), and when the two hire a smuggler to drive a ramshackle truck 500 miles across the desert, braving checkpoints and gunfire, it’s an existential comedy of terror. The key to it all is that the two actors play it straight. David, tense and calculating, but in way over his head, is our representative, and Miles Teller has the gift of making decency magnetic. As for Hill, amazingly, he forms a direct connection to the audience even though he’s playing an irredeemable, mostly charm-free jerk who may, in fact, be a reckless sociopath. We should, objectively, be repelled by him, but in “War Dogs,” Hill, more than ever, is a true star, with a hellbent charisma that comes from deep within.

There’s a scene set in Vegas (of course!), and it’s there, at a combat expo, that our heroes meet a legendary underground arms dealer played by Bradley Cooper, whose mystique feels as formidable as it does (in a Todd Phillips movie) inevitable. He helps to set in motion their hugest deal, a contract to sell the Afghan military 100 million rounds of AK-47 ammo — which turn out to be ancient Chinese bullets stowed in decaying warehouses in Albania. By this point, the sheer insanity of the logistics are driving the action (can they repackage all that ammo to camouflage its pedigree?), and that starts to consume what’s left of David’s moral center. But Phillips, to his credit, doesn’t hit us over the head. He threads the movie’s message through every encounter, until we feel the queasiness of how lying can eat away at us. “War Dogs” lets the audience taste the lure of big easy money, and then says: That’s a hangover you have to wake up from.

Reviewed at AMC 34th St., New York, August 9, 2016. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 114 MIN.

  • Production: A Warner Bros. release of a Joint Effort/Mark Gordon Company production. Producers: Mark Gordon, Todd Phillips, Bradley Cooper. Executive producers: David Siegel, Bryan Zuriff.
  • Crew: Directed by Todd Phillips. Written by Phillips, Stephen Chin, Jason Smilovic. Camera (color, widescreen): Lawrence Sher. Editor: Jeff Groth.
  • With: Miles Teller, Jonah Hill, Ana de Armas, Kevin Pollak, Shaun Toub, Steve Lantz, Gregg Weiner, Bradley Cooper.

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‘War Dogs’ Review: Director Todd Phillips Makes His ‘Goodfellas’

Gun running never looked so good as it does in Phillips’ darkly comic riff on the crime genre.

Crime films don’t normally look like War Dogs . Crime in film is, traditionally, domestic. It’s fighting for territory in the city; it’s woven into an urban landscape. But there’s more than one way to be a criminal, and director Todd Phillips takes it international with his latest film. Based on a true story of two young guys who found a way to exploit the American military’s reliance on cheap defense contractors during the second Iraq War, War Dogs is cutting, incisive, fast-paced, irreverent, and hilarious. Showcasing one of the best performances of Jonah Hill ’s career along with another quality turn from Miles Teller , War Dogs may ape the style of Martin Scorsese ’s Goodfellas , but it wears the suit very well.

David Packouz (Teller) is a miserable massage therapist working in Miami Beach in 2005 when he meets up with his best friend from junior high, Efraim Diveroli (Hill). Unlike David, who is scraping by on $75 per massage after a failed attempt to sell bed sheets to nursing homes, the foul-mouthed, crass Efraim is rolling in cash after seizing on the U.S. military’s need for hardware in the Middle East. The two decide to partner up, but as David soon discovers, being a small outfit and relying on the crumbs of defense contracts means cutting some corners and engaging in some shady practices. As Efraim and David’s business grows, their friendship is tested as the greedy Efraim puts David into greater danger.

Although Efraim has a gigantic Scarface poster in his office, Phillips wears his love for Goodfellas on his sleeve. If David weren’t so hopelessly lost at the beginning of the film, it may as well begin with the narration, “As long as I could remember, I wanted to be an arms dealer,” which is probably what would kick off the story if it were told from Efraim’s point of view instead of David’s. But the skillful use of voice over combined with lots of needle-drops makes the comparison to Goodfellas inevitable. While such imitation can usually be grating, Phillips makes it works to his advantage because he’s drastically changed the setting of his crime film.

Envisioning the War on Terror as fertile ground for a crime story is a little genius, and Phillips fully embraces his unique setting and premise. Rather than make overarching statements like “War is a crime” or “the second Iraq War was a crime,” War Dogs has a far more cold-hearted and cynical take: “War is an economy.” When David and Efraim look at soldiers, they don’t see men serving their country; they see dollar signs.

It’s a bit of a shame that War Dogs didn’t come out during the Bush administration; Efriam yelling “God bless Dick Cheney’s America!” would have a bit more punch then than it does now, but it’s important that we don’t bury this part of our history. Phillips doesn’t try to re-fight old battles and this isn’t an anti-Bush screed, but it is very much the story of how larger government inaction and lack of oversight allowed two hucksters like Packouz and Diveroli to prosper. War creates a ripple effect, and if no one is asking the right questions, then two unethical guys can become instrumental in profiting off the war effort.

Rather than pontificate or preach about the war, Phillips keeps us wrapped up in David and Efraim’s lifestyle. It’s a dark story that’s played with a lot of lightness and humor, and that irreverence fuels the overall attitude of the picture. Phillips has taken one of his greatest assets—showing characters having a good, raucous time—and translated it into a morally questionable arena where you’re forced to consider if you would, given the chance, make the same choices as David. That’s the clever sneak attack of War Dogs : most of us would never want to be gangsters because we don’t want to kill people; but we might be okay with selling the weapons that people in a far off land can use to kill each other. We can see that the closer David gets to the action, the more uncomfortable he becomes, and the indictment of the viewer is that we’ve seen the war in the Middle East from a distance. There’s no draft and media coverage is tightly regulated.

This allows War Dogs to be a largely guilt-free concoction, although you won’t be able to shake the undercurrent of discomfort that runs throughout the picture. It’s a movie that’s a lot of fun, and yet it should make you a little uneasy to see that not only Efraim and David succeeded, but that the system allowed them to become incredibly wealthy and powerful even though they were just living off the crumbs. If Phillips had focused more on the weight of the conflict, it would be a war movie; but it’s a breezy crime film and I applaud his subversion.

He’s also helped tremendously by Hill’s performance. Hill continues to grow as an actor and he’s perhaps one of the most underrated actors working today. It’s incredibly easy to dismiss him as the same guy from Superbad , but Hill has grown remarkably over the past ten years. He’s still painfully funny, but the dramatic work he brings to his performances really shines. He can be restrained like his turns in Moneyball or True Story , or when he lets loose like he does in War Dogs , it can be hypnotic. Efriam is a total sociopath, but Hill injects the role with surprising amounts of loneliness and desperation. When he gives his high-pitched, affected laugh, you get the sense that Efriam is doing it because he wants to be perceived as normal, not because he can actually feel joy or humor. Hill could have just done a more adult version of Seth from Superbad or Noah from The Sitter , but he really digs into the darkness of Efriam’s character and comes out with a performance that’s equal parts humorous and disturbing.

While Hill steals the show, Teller provides admirable support playing the straight man of the piece. It’s the less glamorous, less flashy role, but it’s essential to why War Dogs works. The audience knows we’re not Efriam, and the audience doesn’t want to be a sociopath like Efriam. What we want to know is if we could be tempted like David is tempted, and Teller makes us believe that we could. This is a fine everyman performance by the gifted young actor, and he’s smart enough to know that his purpose isn’t to outshine Hill but to serve the larger picture.

And that larger picture is the best Phillips has ever done. While The Hangover is more rewatchable and more entertaining, War Dogs is more ambitious and it shows an impressive level of growth for the director. His party aesthetic makes the setting come alive, and it fits well with the irreverent story he’s telling. While it would be tempting to write off Phillips after his failed Hangover sequels, War Dogs shows that he’s not done surprising us.

Although the movie isn’t without its faults, especially as it starts to drag in the third act where the twists and turns become a bit predictable and dictated by the tropes of the genre, War Dogs is still an unexpected success. It’s an unconventional crime narrative told with biting humor and a flippant attitude that ironically make its critiques even more devastating.

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Movie Interviews

Interview with jonah hill and todd phillips on new film 'war dogs'.

Jonah Hill and Todd Phillips talk with Rachel Martin about their "War Dogs," which tells the mostly-true story of two pot-smoking 20-year-olds who win a $300 million U.S. government weapons contract.

'War Dogs' Cries Havoc And Lets Slip The Dudes Of War

Movie Reviews

'war dogs' cries havoc and lets slip the dudes of war.

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Strangely tiresome … Miles Teller, left, and Jonah Hill.

War Dogs review – gun runners Jonah Hill and Miles Teller off target

Todd Phillips’ excitable real-life story of two twentysomething dudes keeps telling us how bad arms dealing is but how cool they are

T odd Phillips’ smug bro adventure stars Jonah Hill and Miles Teller as two adorable twentysomething arms dealers having some pretty wild times in Miami and Fallujah. It puts an excitable spin on the true story of David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli: young stoner dudepreneurs who got rich brokering minor arms deals to the US military and were finally busted for flogging dodgy Chinese ammo. (The movie is based on a 2011 Rolling Stone article about their exploits.)

With its generic hints of The Hangover (which Phillips directed) and the boiler-room machismo of The Wolf of Wall Street (which took Jonah Hill to the big league), this is a strangely tiresome film with little in the way of comedy, preoccupied with reassuring the audience of its savvy satirical credentials by perpetually telling us how amoral arms dealing is – but yet how funny and cool these particular arms dealers are.

Jonah Hill does a reasonable job as the outrageous opportunist; Miles Teller is his easily led buddy, the regulation good person and the audience’s point of sympathy contact. He only got into this business because – yeah, right – he needed to provide for his new baby, whose existence enables a deeply boring role for Ana de Armas as Teller’s sad-eyed girlfriend, left worrying why he’s out so late and what he’s up to.

It’s a slippery piece of narrator’s special pleading also beloved of Brit true-crime geezer pics. So is the incessant use of freeze-frame voiceover. Jonah and Miles are not a classic buddy-comedy hookup.

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Humor mixed with guns, drugs, swearing in fact-based tale.

War Dogs Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Much of the movie celebrates/laughs along with poo

Efraim lies to and cheats others, though he eventu

Guns and ammunition play major roles in the plot.

Naked male bottom shown. Scantily clad women dance

Very strong language includes multiple uses of &qu

Skype shown on computer screen.

Main characters regularly smoke pot and occasional

Parents need to know that War Dogs is an irreverent, fact-based comedy from the director of the Hangover movies about twentysomething arms dealers who landed a $300 million government contract in 2007 to supply weapons for U.S. allies in Afghanistan. So it's not surprising that guns play a large…

Positive Messages

Much of the movie celebrates/laughs along with poor behavior, though eventually the behavior is -- for the most part -- punished. The movie is clearly also commenting on the relationship between war and profit.

Positive Role Models

Efraim lies to and cheats others, though he eventually pays a price. David is seduced into poor behavior; he enjoys his money and success for a while but ultimately decides that he values family and honestly above all. He's punished for his wrongs and rewarded for his change of heart. Women aren't presented with much depth or complexity.

Violence & Scariness

Guns and ammunition play major roles in the plot. Guns are drawn and fired. Kicking, punching, beating, and slamming.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Naked male bottom shown. Scantily clad women dance in a nightclub. Several raunchy sexual references. Kissing. A man says that he's "with a prostitute" (but nothing is shown). A man answers his hotel room door with a scantily clad woman seen behind him.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Very strong language includes multiple uses of "f--k" and "s--t," plus "motherf----r," "a--hole," "bitch," "d--k," "c--k," "c--ksucker," "ass,"" "hell,: "tool," "retarded," "piss," and "cum." Middle-finger gestures.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

Main characters regularly smoke pot and occasionally drink beer. Some cocaine sniffing. Drug dealers are shown. Some cigarette smoking; packages of cigarettes shown.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that War Dogs is an irreverent, fact-based comedy from the director of the Hangover movies about twentysomething arms dealers who landed a $300 million government contract in 2007 to supply weapons for U.S. allies in Afghanistan. So it's not surprising that guns play a large part in the movie's plot. And there's a fair amount of shooting, though very little blood or death. More often, characters are beaten up. The main characters also smoke pot frequently, as well as drink beer and sniff cocaine; there's also some smoking. Language is strong, with multiple uses of "f--k," "s--t," and more. Expect quite a bit of raunchy innuendo and sex talk, along with some other minor sexual situations, kissing, scantily clad dancers, and a naked male butt. Teens could be drawn in by stars Jonah Hill and Miles Teller , and though the characters' bad behavior is played for laughs, there are eventually (some) consequences for what they do, and the movie offers something of a satire on war and the economy that could inspire interesting discussion. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Interesting and fun movie

What's the story.

In WAR DOGS, David Packouz ( Miles Teller ) is making a meager living as a massage therapist in Florida in 2005. When his girlfriend, Iz ( Ana de Armas ), announces that she's pregnant, David doesn't know how he's going to make it. That's when old pal Efraim Diveroli ( Jonah Hill ) -- who sells weapons, ammo, and other military equipment to the U.S. military overseas -- offers him a job. The pair's adventures take them to the Middle East, where they must physically drive a truckload of Derringers through Jordan to Iraq. But their biggest challenge comes when they win a contract to supply hundreds of millions of AK-47 bullets. A new contact ( Bradley Cooper ) sets them up in Albania, but there's a problem. Can the old friends survive this dangerous game?

Is It Any Good?

Gleefully irreverent, with a so-crazy-it-must-be-true vibe, this exuberant comedy manages to be wildly entertaining while simultaneously finding alarming cracks in the fabric of American society. Director Todd Phillips started decades ago with a punk rock documentary about GG Allin & the Murder Junkies, and he's at his best whenever he's able to keep up that kind of energy in his work (i.e. Old School , The Hangover , etc.).

However -- unlike the similar The Wolf of Wall Street -- War Dogs can't quite sustain its zing, and, like many Hollywood comedies, the humor flags as the filmmakers settle in to wrap up the story. De Armas plays an unfortunately typical "girlfriend" role, and there are a few too many rock songs on the soundtrack; perhaps tightening up those things could have quickened the movie's pace. But Hill gives a fascinating, hilarious performance as the consummate salesman who's as diverting as he is calculating, and Teller is a good match. As it stands, the movie is very funny -- and a little bit smart.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about War Dogs ' use of guns and violence . Is there a detachment between guns and violence? How? What message does that send? What's the impact of media violence on kids?

How does the movie portray drugs and drinking ? Are they glamorized? Are there consequences ? Why is that important?

Can these characters be considered role models ? What are their rewards? Their punishments?

What does the movie have to say about war, the military, and business in America? Does the movie inspire you to find out more?

How are female characters portrayed in the movie? What message does that send?

Movie Details

  • In theaters : August 19, 2016
  • On DVD or streaming : November 22, 2016
  • Cast : Miles Teller , Bradley Cooper , Jonah Hill
  • Director : Todd Phillips
  • Studio : Warner Bros.
  • Genre : Comedy
  • Run time : 114 minutes
  • MPAA rating : R
  • MPAA explanation : language throughout, drug use and some sexual references
  • Last updated : December 6, 2022

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‘war dogs’: film review.

Miles Teller and Jonah Hill star as childhood pals who become international arms dealers in this new comedy from Todd Phillips (the 'Hangover' franchise).

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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Minor-league scumbags try to take their hustle to the bigs and find themselves in way over their heads in War Dogs , a moderately amusing based-on-reality account of two young American opportunists who bumble and bully their way into the world of international arms dealing during the Iraq War. The two misguided schemers here, played with simultaneously engaging and repellent energy by Jonah Hill and Miles Teller , definitely walk the same side of the street as the guys in Todd Phillips ‘ Hangover outings and even bump into Bradley Cooper on a visit to Las Vegas, but the stakes they play for end up being very much higher. Although comic films about Americans in Middle Eastern war zones ( Rock the Kasbah , Whiskey Tango Foxtrot) haven’t exactly caught the public’s fancy, this one should pull in reasonable late-summer returns for Warner Bros.

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Working from a 2011 Rolling Stone article by Guy Lawson, scriptwriters Phillips, Stephen Chin and Jason Smilovic had a tough task cut out for them creating any rooting interest in their two leading characters. David Packouz (Teller) is a bland 22-year-old unsuccessfully trying to peddle high-thread-count bedsheets to old folks’ homes when, in 2005, he fatefully re-encounters childhood pal Efraim Diveroli (Hill), an overweight bully and loud-mouth who brazenly demonstrates his startling unpredictability by pulling a machine gun out of his car trunk and firing it in the direction of some dudes who have ripped him off in a drug deal.

Release date: Aug 19, 2016

David, who has absolutely nothing going for him (except for an unaccountably beautiful girlfriend, played by Ana de Armas ), isn’t exactly crazy about Efraim’s bluster and erratic behavior. But he does enjoy the man’s bottomless supply of drugs, is amused by his idol worship of Al Pacino’s Scarface and is impressed by the money coming in from his sale of some equipment to the CIA, so he willingly becomes Efraim’s tag-along accomplice when it seems the sky’s the limit.

Perhaps as a sop to modern audiences, the script makes a big point out of having both guys say they don’t like George W. Bush and are opposed to the Iraq War. All the same, the yarn hinges on their unbridled enthusiasm for a new administration initiative that opens up bidding for U.S. military contracts to any and all comers (an actual decision taken in reaction to charges of government cronyism with Halliburton and other huge corporate war beneficiaries). Efraim and David spend a lot of time scrolling down the official government website listing all the war-connected contracts on offer, and it’s the latter who nails a deal to deliver a huge supply of Berretas to U.S. forces in Iraq.

Pulling this off requires far more effort, ingenuity and sheer luck than the boys bargained for, just as it provides the film with its most eventful and suspenseful interlude. Call it beginners’ luck or a case of what you don’t know can’t hurt you, but the guys end up having to fly in a panic to Jordan, then accompany their cargo by night across 500 miles of desert to Baghdad as their laconic local driver assures them it’s a “very safe” trip — their chances of making it are 50-50.

But once they cash in, their hubris triggers predictably dire consequences. Now ensconced in lavish digs filled out with a raft of employees, the boys head for a giant ammo Expo in Vegas — ”It’s like Comic-Con with grenades,” Efraim allows — where a mysterious gentleman (Bradley Cooper) informs of them of an enormous opportunity awaiting resourceful chaps like themselves: a Cold War era’s worth of ammo still sitting packaged and unused in Albanian warehouses, enough to lure ready buyers in Afghanistan to the tune of $300 million.

As things unspool and unravel, Iraq looks like paradise compared to Albania, where the duplicity, craftiness and deceit of communism’s survivors quickly shows up the young Americans for the arrivistes they are. Whatever fates await these little sharks who decided to jump into the pool with the big sharks, no one can say they didn’t have it coming.

It’s not possible to claim that Efraim and David are charming or even good company, so irresponsible is the former and lacking in character is the latter. But the combination of bluster and maybe even partial insanity in the former and optimistic gullibility in the latter combines with the outrageous situations they bring upon themselves to keep you warily fascinated, if not charmed. Hardly inexperienced at playing belligerent, outrageous and offensive a-holes, Hill offers a definitive account of one here, to which Teller can only play the blander, if useful, second fiddle who has to try, and try again, to stand up to the gruff bully. Maybe in 20 years they can co-star in a Broadway revival of The Odd Couple.

Distributor: Warner Bros. Production: Joint Effort, Mark Gordon Company Cast: Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, Ana de Armas , Kevin Pollak , J.B. Blanc, Bradley Cooper, Barry Livingston, Bryan Chesters Director: Todd Phillips Screenwriters: Stephen Chin, Todd Phillips, Jason Smilovic , based on the Rolling Stone article “Arms and the Dudes” by Guy Lawson Producers: Mark Gordon, Todd Phillips, Bradley Cooper Executive producers: David Siegel, Bryan Suriff , Brett Ratner , Scott Budnick , Mark O’Connor Director of photography: Lawrence Sher Production designer: Bill Brzeski Costume designer: Michael Kaplan Editor: Jeff Groth Music: Cliff Martinez Casting: John Papsidera

Rated R, 114 minutes

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘War Dogs’ on Netflix, Where Jonah Hill and Miles Teller Become International Arms Dealers Overnight

Where to stream:.

In War Dogs (Netflix), two twentysomething dorks cut into the international arms trade through a back door, and their business goes ballistic pretty damn quick. Ready or not, the business of war is calling, and they put good decisions in life and work on hold in search of greed and greenbacks.

WAR DOGS : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Childhood pals David Packouz (Miles Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill) randomly reconnect in 2005 Miami and horn their way into the international arms trade, enabled by an open bidding system on US military weapons contracts, a thriving marketplace for mayhem called the Iraq War, and their own unflagging desire to achieve the American dream. Before he runs into Efraim at the funeral of a mutual acquaintance, David is a massage therapist and struggling entrepreneur. But almost before he knows what’s happening, he’s sitting in Efraim’s new office, ripping bong hits while wearing mil-spec NVGs as a subway-sized poster of Al Pacino in Scarface looms over his shoulder.

David’s old buddy shows him an online doomscroll of biddable contracts — “it’s like EBay, but for war” — and with Efraim’s big talk and and ethical elasticity out front, the two exploit that leaky government procurement process to secure lucrative contracts supplying the military with guns, ammunition, grenades, and all manner of small arms. As the easy money rolls Efraim and David’s way, War Dogs takes on the trappings of Entourage -style bro dream, all aspirational gleam and montages of smoking joints all the way to the bank. This is a Todd Phillips operation, after all, and it sticks to the foul-mouthed, vaguely aggro bad behavior vibe the writer and director established with Old School and the Hangover films.

As the contracts and opportunities to convert them into bigger and bigger payouts pile up, David and Efraim are more than happy to cut basic corners. You know, like keeping legitimate business records. And David compromises his relationship with girlfriend Iz (Ana de Armas), lying about trips to the dicey locales where the arms trade thrives. Jordan. Iraq. Albania. And finally, when the biggest arms contract of them all floats before their eyes (courtesy of a shady arms world heavyweight played by Bradley Cooper in what amounts to a cameo) David and Efraim will put everything on the line, including their partnership, in a play for a fully weaponized profit margin.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? With its still frame edit drops and frequent stretches of voiceover narration, War Dogs riffs on Scorsese even as it echoes Phillips’ own work with the Hangover series, presenting the risk of bodily harm from risible characters as fodder for bro-down arrogance. Meanwhile, 2005’s Lord of War paired Nicolas Cage with Jared Leto as emotionally broken arms-dealing brothers.

Performance Worth Watching: Jonah Hill makes Efraim Diveroli the kid whose version of congeniality is abrasive, obnoxious, and pretty obviously transparent, but just genuine enough to be magnetic. Outwardly a loudmouth who lives even louder, Hill is also sure to convey how truly empty Diveroli is at his core. He gloats, grovels, spits garrulous game, and shits on relationships — whatever it takes to convert on a deal. And all of it is couched in a nasally, dismissive guffaw.

Memorable Dialogue: “David, we’re gunrunners. Let’s go run some fucking guns.” Efraim sees the binary at work in getting their crates of handguns to their destination, even if it means bucking through a war zone on a dark, diesel-choked desert highway. David is more wary, but can understand it in the macro. “It was fucking surreal,” he says in voiceover. “Six months ago I was a massage therapist in Miami Beach. Now, here I was, driving a truckload of guns through Iraq with my best friend from junior high.”

Sex and Skin: None. Lots of cussing and the ingestion of intoxicants, though.

Our Take: As the wide-eyed newcomer to Efraim’s scheming arms dealing, David asks questions for the audience, which often boil down to wondering out loud why any government body or mysterious foreign military concern would choose to do business with a tiny company run by two idiots in their 20s. The answer, invariably, is money. “War is an economy,” David tells us in VO, and when he and Efraim offer a low-ball bid on a boffo contract for 7.62 ammunition, the military purchasing agents can’t resist the savings opportunity. In War Dogs , everybody is chasing cash, and the moral relevance of what’s on the other side of the gun barrel doesn’t figure into the balance sheet. The film’s stance seems to be that, since warmaking long ago corrupted the entire world, one might as well get what there is to be gotten. But by the time these two have gotten it, we don’t really care about what physical and moral cost they might pay, and the montages of blowing coke rails and blasting away with a grey market AK blend together into a bland stream of stimulus.

Our Call: STREAM IT. For all its flirting with the stigma of modern warfare’s commoditization and government bodies buying bullets from the lowest bidder, War Dogs operates largely without a conscience. But it’s already calculated that you’ll go along for the ride.

Should you stream or skip the 2016 crime drama #WarDogs on @netflix ? #SIOSI — Decider (@decider) February 10, 2021

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

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‘War Dogs’ Review: Jonah Hill and Miles Teller Bring Out the Big Guns

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Jonah Hill and Miles Teller fire up big-time laughs, but don’t ignore the crazy-ass political absurdity that burns through War Dogs. (Crazy-ass political absurdity being right up in our faces these days.) Based on the 2011 Rolling Stone article, “The Stoner Arms Dealers,” the movie is so achingly true it defies belief. I mean, who’d accept that two twentysomething yeshiva boys from Miami could strike it rich by bidding on U.S. military contracts? 

But that’s what was going down in the mid 2000s, during the Bush-Cheney invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. You just had to know how to exploit it. Teller plays David Packouz, a massage therapist who isn’t cutting it as a breadwinner for his pregnant girlfriend Iz (Ana de Armas) and knows nothing about military contracts. He needs a mentor to show him the ropes. He finds one in his junior-high chum Efraim Diveroli, played by Hill as a ravenous mountain of a con artist who never met a scam he couldn’t squeeze for more. He tells David to stop “jerking guys off” and trying to sell “quality bed sheets” to nursing homes and go where the money is, along with babes and the blow. As a Scarface -worshipper from way back, Efraim knows that scene.

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For a while, director and co-writer Todd Phillips charges through the movie like he’s staging a new addition to his Hangover trilogy. And two-time Academy award nominee Hill plays Efraim with such irresistible bravura you’d follow him anywhere. David sure does. Then darkness creeps in. Kudos to the excellent Teller for becoming the audience surrogate as he sees his partner losing control. Soon they’re delivering Berettas to American troops in Baghdad, driving unwittingly through Iraq’s Triangle of Death, and bluffing their way through a $300 million contract from the Pentagon to sell 100 million rounds of AK-74 ammunition to the Afghan army. Bradley Cooper shows up in sleazeball mode as the middleman who greases the deal. To say these stoner war dogs are in over their heads is an understatement.

I’ve heard some critics complain about this movie’s shifting tones — except tones do nothing but shift for David and Efraim. Phillips deserves credit for letting us feel what they feel, including the desperation and not including the lazy moralizing that would explain it all in capital letters. We learn what we need to know from watching Hill and Teller, two actors who understand that show is always better than tell. Even when Phillips gets too into his Scorsese GoodFellas groove, he captures something essential about America’s jackpot mentality and how easy it is to get on board. War Dogs is that rare contemporary comedy that knows how to make a laugh stick in your throat.

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war dogs movie review

  • DVD & Streaming

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war dogs movie review

In Theaters

  • August 19, 2016
  • Jonah Hill as Efraim Diveroli; Miles Teller as David Packouz; Ana de Armas as Iz; Bradley Cooper as Henry Girard

Home Release Date

  • November 22, 2016
  • Todd Phillips

Distributor

  • Warner Bros.

Movie Review

Is war about justice? Freedom? Democratic values? Nation-building?

Not if you ask twentysomethings David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli. No, if you ask them what war is really about, they’ve got a different answer: Money.

“War is an economy,” David tells us in the opening moments of War Dogs , a film based on a true story about two enterprising Millennials who cunningly landed a $300 million arms contract to outfit Afghan rebels. “Anybody who tells you otherwise is either in on it or stupid.”

David, mind you, wasn’t always this knowledgeable (or cynical, for that matter) about the gritty, grimy, slimy underbelly of international arms dealing. In fact, David was pretty much just like a lot of folks in his generation, struggling to make ends meet in a job he hated (working as a masseuse in Miami).

Until, that is, the day he runs into his best friend from childhood, one Efraim Diveroli. And that day, everything changes for David.

That’s because Efraim, a natural-born entrepreneur who’s not at all afraid to take huge risks or bend the truth a bit (or a lot), has stumbled upon a little-known website that allows small businesses to bid on government contracts to supply the military some of its materiel. The public site is the government’s attempt at procurement reform, ostensibly put in place to give the “little guys” a shot at contracts that have in the past gone to companies with ties to people high up in the government. (Like, say, Dick Cheney, according to the film.)

“It’s eBay for war,” Efraim gushes to his old friend, whom he’s trying to recruit to join him in the lucrative business of playing the middle man between weapons manufacturers and Uncle Sam. “Bush opened the floodgates!”

When David hesitates, being against the war in Iraq and all, Efraim pours on the salesman charm. “It’s not about being pro-war. It’s about being pro-money.” Indeed, Efraim brags that he’s made $200,000 in the last eight weeks alone.

David can’t resist the allure of cashola like that, of course. (Never mind that he’s not quite honest to his girlfriend, Iz, about what he’s actually doing.) Soon the two young Americans find themselves driving a truckload of pistols from Amman, Jordan, across the so-called “Triangle of Death” to an American general in Baghdad. (Never mind—again—that they just about died in the process, something else he doesn’t quite tell his pregnant girlfriend).

But even that significantly lucrative deal pales in comparison to the one that they stumble upon next: working covertly with notorious arms dealer Henry Girard to sell the U.S. government a whopping 100 million rounds of leftover AK-47 ammo sitting forgotten in an Albanian warehouse (among other things).

Everybody wins, right? I mean, what could possibly go wrong when two twentysomething dudes from Miami actually win a contract to arm the entire Afghan resistance?

Positive Elements

David is a basically a decent, normal guy. He strives to do right by his girlfriend, Iz, after learning that she’s pregnant, promising to take care of her and the baby (though there’s no talk of marriage just yet). David’s also intensely loyal to Efraim—someone who, we learn, isn’t worthy of David’s faithfulness to him or the sacrifices David makes on his behalf.

The exponentially increasing amounts of money involved in the transactions that Efraim and David make not surprisingly leads to more and more deception—including fabricating many of the details that help them land that massive government contract. That’s not good, of course. But David eventually comes to see Efraim for exactly who he is: a master manipulator whose greedy loyalty is only to himself. David is in the process of trying to distance himself from his former partner when a federal investigation ultimately catches up with both of them after their so-called “Afghan Deal” predictably goes awry.

Iz initially gives David grace when she discovers that he hasn’t been telling her the truth about what he’s been doing. When the lies continue, however, she wisely leaves him (and the luxurious lifestyle they’re now living in a swank penthouse apartment in Miami) to go live with her mother. David eventually wins her trust again and renounces the money-chasing pursuits that have done so much damage to their relationship. In the end, Iz affirms that she never really cared about the money, but she did care about David.

Spiritual Elements

Efraim (as his name hints) is Jewish. But he only claims his Jewish identity when it’s to his benefit. He pretends to be a devout Jew to convince his uncle (who owns a dry cleaning business) to invest in his company. “We’re doing God’s work,” he claims. “Protecting Israel.” But he’s not above pretending to be something else when necessary. Schmoozing on the phone with a general, he says, “From one Christian to another … ” When Efraim and David are paid handsomely for successfully delivering guns to Iraq, Efraim exclaims, “God bless Dick Cheney’s America.”

At a funeral, a Jewish rabbi says that there is “no table of contents in the Book of Life,” and he says that we never know when each of our “books” will be completed.

Sexual Content

David and Iz kiss. She comes out of a bathroom in her underwear and a tank top holding a positive pregnancy test. Later, she and David go to get her first ultrasound and learn that they’re having a baby girl.

One of David’s clients, a rich middle-aged man, purposefully drops the towel covering his backside and exposes his bare rear to David. It’s implied that David’s desperate enough for money that he’s performed sexual acts on male clients (something Efraim mercilessly and repeatedly needles him about throughout the movie).

Efraim regularly talks about oral sex and manual stimulation, and isn’t above crudely and suggestively dropping the phrase “your mom” into already foul dialogue. We see him in a room with a mostly unclothed prostitute as the strains of Neil Diamond’s song “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” play in the background. Efraim laments that he can’t find a woman to perform oral sex on him in a Muslim country.

Several scenes in Miami show women wearing bikinis. David and Efraim have drinks in a bar with nearly nude (but still barely covered) women dancing in the background.

Violent Content

David is kidnapped, thrown in car trunk, badly beaten and has a gun held to his face by men who think he’s double-crossed them. (He hasn’t, but Efraim has.) David hits Efraim in the face. Efraim successfully terrifies a drug dealer who refuses to give him marijuana after he’s paid for it. He does so by calmly walking to his car, retrieving a fully automatic machine gun and randomly firing bursts into the air. (Later he also unloads a clip of AK-47 ammo into a barrel to test it.) A bar fight results in both guys getting roughed up and a table being smashed.

David, Efraim and their Jordanian driver are pursued by two truckloads of insurgents who fire multiple shots around at them before being dispersed by a U.S. Army helicopter and soldiers in Humvees.

It’s implied that Efraim’s attempt to manipulate the Afghan Deal to make even more money resulted in a man being killed. David finds a dead man full of bullet holes in an otherwise deserted Iraqi gas station. David lobs a gold-covered grenade facsimile through Efraim’s office window.

Crude or Profane Language

Nearly 130 f-words, including at least 10 pairings with “mother.” About 40 s-words. God’s name is abused about half a dozen times. We hear three crude references to the male anatomy, including a rude slang reference to oral sex. Other profanities include “a–,” “a–hole,” “b–ch” and “p-ss.” There’s a single usage of “n-gga.” We see multiple crude hand gestures.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Characters smoke cigarettes and consume various alcoholic beverages throughout the film. David and Efraim both repeatedly smoke marijuana. David is shown hitting a huge bong, and both of them get very stoned before pitching the Afghan Deal to a high-level group of military procurement officials and officers. As they make more money, Efraim’s behavior becomes more self-destructive and hedonistic, and we see him snort cocaine a couple of times.

Efraim, David and a Jordanian smuggler aptly (but mockingly) dubbed “Marlboro” bribe Irqaqi soldiers with two cases of cigarettes in order to gain access to that country at the border.

Other Negative Elements

When people don’t do what Efraim wants and he can’t manipulate them, he often launches into profane verbal tirades berating and belittling them. Efraim and David sign a contract that guarantees David 30% of the company’s earnings, but Efraim secretly finds and destroys it so that he won’t have to pay his friend that percentage.

When David is queasy about doing a deal with someone who’s been banned from the U.S. because he’s on a terrorist watch list, Efraim rationalizes, “This is the job: to do business with the people the U.S. government can’t do business with directly.”

Efraim regularly lies to people to get deals done. “When does telling the truth ever help anybody?” he says. At a key point, he also fails to pay a group of workers who’ve helped package ammunition. It’s suggested that Efraim also stole $70,000 from a relative. He demeans a young Jordanian boy by calling him “Aladdin.”

Efraim urinates (with his back to the camera) outside an abandoned Iraqi gas station. We see people gambling huge sums of money at a casino in Las Vegas.

War Dogs is a profane cautionary tale about what happens when greed and cleverness inevitably undermine integrity in the pursuit of lots of money. Answer: for a while you get very, very rich. Then you go to jail.

To the film’s credit, one of its two main characters eventually has a prodigal son-style “coming to his senses” moment where David realizes that no amount of money is worth what he’s doing to his relationship with his girlfriend and to his own conscience, for that matter. The fact that Efraim ends up with a seven-year prison sentence (David gets seven months of house arrest after cooperating with investigators) further reinforces the point that trying to make millions by deceiving the government isn’t a good idea. At all.

Still, that’s also a moral that should be pretty self-evident. And one that doesn’t require sitting through two hours and nearly 200 profanities to take seriously.

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Adam R. Holz

After serving as an associate editor at NavPress’ Discipleship Journal and consulting editor for Current Thoughts and Trends, Adam now oversees the editing and publishing of Plugged In’s reviews as the site’s director. He and his wife, Jennifer, have three children. In their free time, the Holzes enjoy playing games, a variety of musical instruments, swimming and … watching movies.

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war dogs movie review

War Dogs Review

By Alan Cerny

7.5 out of 10

Jonah Hill as Efraim Diveroli Miles Teller as David Packouz Ana de Armas as Iz Bradley Cooper as Henry Girard Kevin Pollak as Ralph Slutsky JB Blanc as Bashkim Patrick St. Esprit as Captain Philip Santos Shaun Toub as Marlboro J B Blanc as Bashkim

Directed by Todd Phillips

War Dogs Review:

Todd Phillips, who got his start making documentaries about college dudebro culture ( Frat House ) and controversial, intense punk rock musician GG Allin ( Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies ), has always tested the boundaries of just how far he can take his characters into contemptibility and still make an entertaining, riveting movie. In that aspect, Phillips shares a common trait with filmmakers like Martin Scorsese – like Goodfellas  and The Wolf of Wall Street , War Dogs  is fascinated with the unsavory, the criminal, and the unrepentantly masculine. War Dogs  could be considered Scorsese-light – Phillips uses musical needle drops and the film’s editing style is very similar to Thelma Schoonmaker’s. Phillips even uses voiceover, as David Packouz (Miles Teller) tells his rags-to-riches-to-rags story of how he and his junior high school best friend Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill) managed to take advantage of some government loopholes and provide weapons to the United States military and make a pretty penny doing it.  Based on the Rolling Stone article and subsequent book Arms and the Dudes by Guy Lawson, War Dogs follows Packouz and Diveroli as they manage to scam the military, other foreign governments, and in the end, each other.

How much is fiction and how much is fact is up to the audience to discover, but Phillips is able to make this far-fetched scenario very believable.  When David sees Efraim at a mutual friend’s funeral, Efraim is very eager to get David involved in his business, looking for the “crumbs” in the many government bid contracts that sprang up during the Iraq War. Efraim figures that they can help fill the small orders, and since it’s all government money anyway, they can easily make a profit. War Dogs never gets into the specifics, but like The Wolf of Wall Street , those specifics aren’t necessary to understand the movie. In no time at all, David and Efraim are driving from Jordan to Iraq to deliver illegally-procured Berettas to the Iraqi police force, and when they become successful, David and Efraim get the attention of some big players in the military contract community, including some shady businessmen like the mysterious Henry Girard (Bradley Cooper).

War Dogs is a big step up for Todd Phillips, who seemed to have plateaued himself after the “Hangover” movies. War Dogs is very much a comedy, but Phillips, along with screenwriters Stephen Chin and Jason Smilovic, also examines with dispassion just how Kafkaesque the United States military was (and still is) during the war. No one is aware of what anyone is doing, which makes it easy for Packouz and Diveroli to take advantage. These guys aren’t smart, are stoned all the time, but also know a great opportunity when they see it. Packouz is especially motivated to do well – his girlfriend Iz (Ana de Armas) is having his child, and he wants to give them more than what he could make as a massage therapist. While Diveroli is in it for the cash, the drugs, and the sex, Packouz wants to make enough money to live a good life. Miles Teller gives Packouz an innate sense of decency, but the lies and deception take its toll on him and his relationship. Teller also has great chemistry and comic timing with his co-stars, and is very much the audience’s surrogate as the film navigates through the complex world of arms dealing.

Jonah Hill’s Oscar nominations were no fluke. He can be hilarious one moment, and quite scary the next. Efraim is all things to all people, whatever can get him the deal he seeks or the help he needs, and Hill plays Efraim as a master manipulator – of the military, of their benefactor Ralph Slutsky (Kevin Pollak), of the sellers and the buyers, and even of David. Jonah Hill is terrific as Efraim, in one of the best roles of his career. Sometimes Efraim himself doesn’t know who he’s manipulating, and Hill gives Efraim the right amount of ooze and slime, but we are still able to see the young man underneath, alone, outsmarted, and outmatched. Efraim is riding this horse as long as it will carry him, and regardless of who it hurts along the way. In The Wolf of Wall Street , Jonah Hill’s character had a kind of moral compass, even if it was muddied and scattered. Efraim has no such direction, and is willing to screw over everyone to get what he wants.

Sometimes Phillips relies too much on voiceover, especially when War Dogs is explaining plot points that are already evident. The film wants us to realize that these guys aren’t heroes, but the audience is doing just fine figuring that out on their own, and the film should trust its audience a bit more.  Ana de Armas isn’t given much to do except be the supporting significant other to David and to give him grief when his lies become evident. Todd Phillips is obviously, happily, riffing on Scorsese, but he’s also doing a decent job of it. This story isn’t new; it’s been told many times over the years, of men who, in trying to make a quick buck, lose sight of their morals and quickly go in over their head, and while Phillips doesn’t put the freshest spin on it, he injects enough humor into War Dogs that the film becomes very entertaining – in an odd way, we’re rooting for these guys even as we despise them, and that is due to the excellent work of Teller and Hill. This story may be routine, but their performances aren’t.

War Dogs is very funny, until it isn’t; Todd Phillips has always been very skilled at bringing the comedy to situations that ordinary people would recoil from. We see the friendship of David and Efraim tested, and we see beneath the rock of international arms dealing at the insects scurrying from the light, and we see the absurdity of how people will justify terrible behavior for a little money and a little power. In films like The Hangover or Old School , we laugh to see these men hurt each other and put themselves into bad situations – we laugh, because it’s not us. We laugh, because these guys deserve it, a little bit. But in War Dogs , after a while, we stop laughing, because these simple men, with delusions of grandeur, and a wasted intellect that cannot hope to match their unchecked pride and ego, aren’t just hurting themselves. Instead, we’re all getting screwed, and that’s not so funny. 

War Dogs is an excellent step forward for Todd Phillips – like Adam McKay, who applied his comedy to the serious story of the housing crash in The Big Short , Phillips is stepping into a deeper ocean. But while McKay’s outrage is evident in his film, Phillips doesn’t bring that sense of anger to War Dogs . He is more detached, distant, and not as brave in exposing the damage that these men did. The best jokes aren’t just funny, but illuminate and reveal truth, and they can cut. War Dogs can’t quite do that, and Phillips can’t wield that sense of injustice like McKay or Scorsese can. But he’s still crafted a very funny, very entertaining movie and I look forward to seeing where this new path takes Phillips as a filmmaker. You can see the great movie inside War Dogs , but for now we’ll have to settle for merely a very good one.

Alan Cerny

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War Dogs: What Happened To The Real Efraim Diveroli & David Packouz

Margot robbie's pirates of the caribbean movie gets promising update from jerry bruckheimer, alien: romulus image reveals weapon of choice for cailee spaeny’s new hero, wars dogs  is a solid movie, but only partly succeeds at blending todd phillips' brand of bro-comedy with social/political commentary..

War Dogs  is told from the perspective of David Packouz (played by Miles Teller). David, in 2005, is a 20-something year old Miami Beach resident who spends his days working as a massage therapist and (unsuccessfully) attempting to sell high-quality bedsheets to Florida state's many retirement homes. Everything then changes for David when he reunites with his old friend, Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill): a swaggering party dude, firearms expert and founder of AEY Inc., the one-man business through which Efraim operates - taking advantage of a loophole that allows any company (however small it may be) to bid on U.S. military contracts.

David, determined and under-pressure to change his financial prospects after his significant other, Iz (Ana de Armas) brings him life-changing news, agrees to work with Efraim at AEY. Before long, David and Efraim find themselves embracing a "Get Rich or Die Trying" philosophy that - shockingly - pays off huge, landing them even more contracts, rapidly growing their business and leading to the sort of major upgrade in lifestyle that David never imagined possible. However, when the duo pursue a U.S. military contract that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, these unlikely "War Dogs" find themselves in danger of finally growing too big for their britches.

Based on Guy Lawson's  Rolling Stone  article "The Stoner Arms Dealers: How Two American Kids Became Big-Time Weapons Traders" (which was later turned into the book  Arms and the Dudes , by Lawson),  War Dogs  is a change of pace for director Todd Phillips - in the sense that it uses a hard-to-believe, real-life, story to make a greater statement about the world and, in particular, the U.S. today (see  Pain & Gain  for a comparable example). At the same time,  War Dogs  has many of the same elements as Phillips' past R-Rated comedies, such as  Old School  and  The Hangover  trilogy.  Wars Dogs  is a solid movie, but only partly succeeds at blending Todd Phillips' brand of bro-comedy with social/political commentary.

War Dogs  very much emulates Martin Scorsese movies such as  The Wolf of Wall Street  and  Goodfellas  in its design - from having its protagonist's voice-over narration serve as a framing device for the overarching story, to using 1960s and '70 tunes (for example, "Fortunate Son") as catchy soundtrack music that serves a thematic purpose.  War Dogs , similar to Scorsese's movies, also brings the story of David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli's rise to infamy to life as an energetic R-Rated piece of entertainment, while at the same time spinning that story as a cautionary tale and a parable about the dark side of the American Dream. All the comparisons to Scorsese aside though, it's  War Dogs'  difficulties with its own balancing act between these two types of storytelling that prevent it from flying higher - as it ultimately plays things too "safe" for its own good.

Part of the problem is that the  War Dogs  script - credited to Phillips, Stephen Chin ( Another Day in Paradise ) and Jason Smilovic ( Lucky Number Slevin ) - is itself a mixed bag. On the one hand, the script serves up a series of (often darkly) funny buddy comedy scenarios and situations - yet the overarching narrative that ties them together follows a very clear-cut and predictable trajectory, especially for a bizarre real-life tale about a pair of "Stoner Arms Dealers." Moreover,  War Dogs  makes for a perfunctory social critique - as it hits many of the same points about wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (being an economic force) as those raised in movies like  Lord of War , over ten years ago. The stabs at absurd political comedy and satire do hit their targets here - but they are less impactful than intended, for related reasons.

Phillips and director of photography Lawrence Sher create effective visual juxtapositions between the film's various settings (ranging from bright and wealthy areas of Miami Beach to dismal and dilapidated regions in Albania), as well as sight gags and clever motifs (see the use of comical freeze frames during Teller's exposition dumps) that present the film's familiar plot and commentary in a funnier and more cinematically engaging way. To be clear:  War Dogs  is not as dramatic or innovative a step away from the look and feel of Phillips' previous mainstream Hollywood comedies as, say, Adam McKay's  The Big Short  was from his past filmography, last year. Nonetheless, this film is still a step up in quality from Phillips and Sher's work together on the  Hangover  trilogy (as well as Phillips' other directorial efforts), just from a technical perspective.

Unfortunately, Miles Teller is saddled with a character (David Packouz) who simply isn't well-developed.  War Dogs , in turn, paints a muddled portrait of David from the get-go, making his arc in the movie less engaging as a result. On the other hand, Packouz's flat portrayal leaves room for Jonah Hill (who has good chemistry with Teller) to continue to make his name as a character actor with a scene-stealing turn as Efraim Diveroli - who, as seen through David's eyes, is an unrepentant sleaze ball (with a great laugh) whose surface masks his darker nature.  War Dogs  is Teller and Hill's show, so supporting players like Ana de Armas ( Knock Knock ) - cast as the stock girlfriend type here - are spectators more than anything else. Still, Phillips'  Hangover  trilogy star, Bradley Cooper, leaves a lasting impression with his (brief but important) appearances as the infamous, yet off-beat, weapons dealer Henry Girard.

When all is said and done,  War Dogs  is an entertaining bro-comedy - but its attempts to portray the "Stoner Arms Dealers" as a microcosm for America produce uneven results. It's a more ambitious comedy/drama than what director Todd Phillips' has made in the past, but proves to be hit-and-miss at actually realizing those ambitions. For these reasons, War Dogs is closer to Pain & Gain in quality than  Wolf of Wall Street - and so long as moviegoers go in expecting as much,  War Dogs  should deliver the engaging stranger-than-fiction experience that they came to see.

War Dogs  is now playing in U.S. theaters nationwide. It is 114 minutes long and is Rated R for language throughout, drug use and some sexual references.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

Our Rating:

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war dogs movie review

Netflix: War Dogs with Miles Teller and Jonah Hill became the No. 10 movie in the US

W hen talking about one of the best comedic duos on the big screen, surely Miles Teller (Top Gun: Maverick) and Jonah Hill (Superbad) make the list, as they demonstrated great chemistry in their comedy “ War Dogs “.

The biographical crime film was released in 2016 and has been gaining views ever since. This week, it has become one of the most-watched films on Netflix in the United States, ranking in the American Top 10 .

Directed by Todd Phillips , known for blockbuster hits like “Joker” starring Joaquin Phoenix and The Hangover with Bradley Cooper, the story is based on the Rolling Stone article “Arms and the Dudes” by Guy Lawson .

War Dogs ranked Top 10 movie on Netflix US

“ War Dogs ” is not just an ordinary American comedy- drama based on true events; in recent weeks, it has been accumulating new views and making its way into the US Top 10 on Netflix .

Flix Patrol reported that the title is one of the strongest trends in the United States, especially among users who enjoy war comedy dramas, and it has managed to surpass multiple well-known productions.

The movie is inspired by a Rolling Stone article titled “Arms and the Dudes” written by Guy Lawson , which tells the true story of two young men who became arms contractors for the United States government.

The story follows two young entrepreneurs, David Packouz (played by Miles Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (played by Jonah Hill), who get involved in the lucrative business of selling arms to the United States government.

Taking advantage of a Pentagon initiative that allows small businesses to compete for defense contracts, these friends embark on a dangerous yet profitable adventure and throughout the film, they face ethical and legal challenges.

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 Netflix: War Dogs with Miles Teller and Jonah Hill became the No. 10 movie in the US

War Dogs (United States, 2016)

War Dogs Poster

The problem with War Dogs isn’t the dark humor nor is it the cynically accurate deconstruction of military procurement and corruption. The lack of dynamism and depth in the characters is what hamstrings this production. There’s little doubt that Hangover director Todd Phillips is channeling Martin Scorsese. Although the most overt references are to Brian DePalma’s Scarface , Phillips sees Miles Teller’s David Packouz as a conflation of Goodfellas ’ Henry Hill and The Wolf of Wall Street ’s Jordan Belfort. However, where Scorsese was able to cultivate the contradictions inherent in the characters of Hill and Belfort, Phillips can’t achieve the same balance with Packouz. Instead of coming across as a complex mix of charisma and bile, David is inexcusably bland. His inability to anchor War Dogs makes the story less involving than it might have been, turning it into a diverting but by no means indispensable expose of the international arms black market.

The based-on-a-true-story premise is that David re-unites with his high school best friend, Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), some ten years after their last meeting. In the interim, their lives have gone in different directions. Efraim is a burgeoning arms dealer and David is a message therapist. When David learns that his girlfriend, Iz (Ana de Armas), is pregnant, he needs to find a way to provide for her and their child, and this leads him to accept an offer to go into business with Efraim, whose schemes are becoming increasingly more shady, convoluted, and dangerous. After securing a major government munitions contract by striking a deal with a less-than-upstanding character (Bradley Cooper) who has all the wrong sorts of contacts, David and Efraim find themselves in over the heads. While David wrestles with his conscience and tries to find a way out, Efraim doubles down, betraying pretty much everyone in the process.

war dogs movie review

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about War Dogs is that the unbelievable aspects of the narrative are true, pulled from Guy Lawson’s Rolling Stone article and his subsequent book. The usual fictionalizations associated with “based on a true story” accounts occur (mostly in the flaccid domestic scenes and banal dialogue) but the overarching narrative structure provides a perspective of governmental dysfunction that, sadly, isn’t all that surprising. Where Phillips loses control is when this element of the film becomes more compelling than the characters. That’s not the recipe for a successful action-comedy-drama. The viewer needs to feel something other than contempt for the governmental bureaucracy that enables men like Efraim and David. That’s part of the reason why, when the movie draws to a close, the viewer is more likely to sense a vague, hard-to-identify frustration than the satisfaction of having experienced a story worth telling.

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War Dogs Review

miles teller jonah hill war dogs

26 Aug 2016

War Dogs is being sold as a comedy, and given that it boasts The Hangover director Todd Phillips behind the wheel, perhaps understandably so. But those hoping to see Ken Jeong leap naked from the boot of a car are liable to be disappointed. There’s plenty of darkly funny moments, but this is a largely serious movie about an entirely serious subject.

As a pacy opening spiel informs us, war is big business, and business was never more booming than during the go-go early 2000s, when President Bush opened the floodgates to small private arms contractors. Practically anyone could grab a piece of the pie — even a couple of flip-flop wearing stoners like David Packouz (Miles Teller) and Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), best friends at high school who reconnect. They’re only aiming for crumbs, but when you’re trading with the world’s largest military, a single crumb is worth millions.

There’s plenty of darkly funny moments, but this is a largely serious movie about an entirely serious subject.

Both Teller and Hill are about ten years older than the unlikely real-life arms dealers they portray, but they bring a fun, sleazy charisma to their roles. David is depicted as a somewhat reluctant merchant of death — an erstwhile anti-war protester, in fact, lured only by a quick buck and the chance to escape his unfulfilling job as a massage therapist.

Efraim, meanwhile, seems more typical of his trade. A high-pitched giggle never far from his lips, he’s a hustler, not above impersonating high-ranking military or grieving parents in order to get ahead. As we saw in The Wolf Of Wall Street , Hill does a good line in playing obnoxious douchebags, and he’s on top form here.

war dogs movie review

We watch in guilty delight as their company (named AEY — an acronym which “doesn’t stand for anything”, in more ways than one) slowly graduates from a smoky bedroom to a gleaming Miami Beach office. The crumbs of war profiteering grow ever meatier, and the duo’s methods grow ever shadier. All of this — the rise-and-fall crime narrative, the all-American lust for money at any cost, the “how did I get here?” narration — aims for Scorsese. It very nearly reaches it, too. It’s not as rich or sophisticated as Marty’s masterpieces, and visually it’s a little unambitious, but the gallows humour and the pace are there. One scene even manages to make the minutiae of cardboard-box negotiations entertaining.

Like much of Scorsese’s work, it’s heavily male-dominated, too. The only female character in the film is David’s disapproving girlfriend, who exists purely to fret from the sidelines, afforded about as much depth as a 9mm shell. (At least Bradley Cooper’s creepy arms dealer bluntly acknowledges the imbalance: “This is why I like the arms business — no women.”) Dick-swinging bravado is the film’s prevailing orthodoxy, and in the process, it occasionally struggles to impart the fairly significant human cost of war profiteering. Only in a single gripping sequence, when the pair rather naively escort a shipment of guns to Baghdad, do we get any sense of the devastating conflicts they are helping to furnish.

Amorality plays such as Thank You For Smoking (or, yes, The Wolf Of The Wall Street) gave their terrible anti-heroes just enough rope with which to hang themselves. War Dogs may not give these douchebags quite enough ammo to shoot themselves with, but it’s enough to give you pause.

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