Directed by: Todd Phillips
Starring: Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, Bradley Cooper, Ana de Armas, Kevin Pollak
The ads for War Dogs read "From the director of The Hangover" plastered at the top. This may mislead some folks into thinking they are in for a Hangover-style comedy. War Dogs is based on true events and I no longer feel the need to write a disclaimer about those. It is a drama with a light touch about two Miami guys who make stupid money brokering arms deals and within a few years have it all fall to pieces. What causes the collapse which ends in an FBI investigation and a mountain of charges? Greed and drugs. One is bad enough. Combine them both and you have a time bomb in the form of Efraim Diveroli (Hill), the founder of AEY Inc. which starts off brokering small deals and works its way to a $300 million ammunition deal that proves to be everyone's undoing.
Diveroli is more obsessed with the kill than he is about the money itself. He gets more of a high on the drama of the deal. Like Danny DeVito in Other People's Money, he likes money more than the things it can buy. His partner David Packouz (Teller) is the more level-headed of the two, but as War Dogs begins is also the guy kidnapped by Albanian thugs with a gun pointed at his head. War Dogs then flashes back to show how David got to that point.
Circa 2005, David's present and future do not look promising. He is a massage therapist whose clientele seems to consist mostly of gay older men. His wife is soon pregnant and he needs money fast. David tries to start a new business selling soft cotton bed sheets to nursing homes, but learns: "People don't give a shit about the elderly." It is his fortune (or maybe misfortune) that he runs into his high school friend Efraim at a funeral. Efraim drives around town in a Porsche. He shows David the ropes of arms dealing. Efraim and David are at first content to "live off the crumbs and not the whole pie" in the cutthroat world of arms dealing, but that soon changes as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drone on endlessly. The needs for arms become bigger and the contracts grow to be more lucrative.
One shipment of arms from Italy to Iraq proves particularly tricky thanks to those pesky international laws and regulations. Their shipment is held up in Jordan and unless David and Efraim figure out a way to get the shipment to Iraq, that is all she wrote for AEY Inc. David and Efraim actually smuggle the arms via truck through a war zone to get the shipment to its destination and things perk up. Then, Efraim and David become greedy, snort coke, and things go south, especially after hooking up with a shadowy dealer named Henry Girard (Cooper), who is banned from conducting arms deals by the U.S. government.
War Dogs takes great care never to lose us as the story progresses. We know what is happening and why. The movie brings us in on the world of arms dealing and gives us an intimate knowledge. David narrates the film, since he at least has some kind of moral compass, while Efraim loses himself in the quest for more money, drugs, and hookers. Efraim's compass went off course long before David hooked up with him. We see Hill as Efraim, always looking for the shortcut and the angles, and he takes us for a ride into the world of the superficial. We never get a true sense of who he is because he is always playing a role. He will be whoever you need him to be and is always scheming, but becomes sloppy and loses sight of the small details such as paying the guys who are helping him defraud the government by repackaging illegal Chinese bullets as legal Soviet ones. Efraim doesn't see how this could go horribly wrong for him. We see in War Dogs, as we did in Moneyball and The Wolf of Wall Street, that Hill is a comic actor with depth and ability.
Teller plays the more identifiable of the two dealers. He was stuck in a rut and found a way to make some money to support his family. The trouble is, this causes him to lie to his wife Iz (the fetching de Armas) about his dealings, which sticks in her craw more than anything. David has morals, but sees the need to put them away as the money rolls in. To him, it beats giving hand jobs. Teller was a standout in Whiplash (2014) and once again plays a guy who will go with the flow but eventually hits a wall. The movie correctly sees the story from his point of view, although it would have been interesting to hear Efraim's take on things occasionally. It would be whacked out to say the least.
I'm glad War Dogs never saw the need to play as an outrageous comedy. It doesn't suit the story. Some people who go into War Dogs expecting something like The Hangover will be disappointed, but I think even more will be pleasantly surprised by how engrossing a story it is. David and Efraim are guys who idolize Scarface and even hang a giant picture of Tony Montana on the office wall, but like many they don't understand Scarface is not a glorification of excess, but a sad tale of how such excesses come with a heavy price.
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