The true story of arms dealers Efraim Diveroli and David
Packouz.
Directed by: Todd Phillips
Starring: Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, Ana de Armas, Bradley
Cooper, Kevin Pollak
Until close to its release, Todd Phillips' latest movie had been
going under the name of 'Arms and the Dudes'. In hindsight that's a far more
apt title, as the protagonists of the movie now known as
War Dogs are the very definition of 'dudes'. Following on from
Michael Bay's Pain & Gain and Martin Scorsese's
The Wolf of Wall Street, this is the latest in a burgeoning sub-genre based on true stories of
young male douchebags chasing the American dream.
The douchebags in question here are Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill) and David Packouz (Miles Teller), two young Florida men who, for a
few years in the '00s, became millionaires through an arms dealing business
that paid scant attention to the small print of US law.
When we meet David first, he's eking out a living as a masseuse, doing his
best to avoid the solicitations of his older male clientele (he's a
masseuse, but he's "no homo", you see). At the funeral of a school friend
he's reunited with former classmate Efraim, a Tony Montana disciple who
introduces him to his then relatively low key arms dealing scheme. When
Efraim takes David under his bingo wings, the two form an effective
partnership, first landing a deal to supply the Iraqi police with Beretta
pistols, which forces them to run the guns through that country's notorious
'Triangle of Death', before later hitting the real big boys' league with a
murky contract to arm the Afghanistan army with AK-47s.
War Dogs is a movie about a dude obsessed with
Scarface, directed by a dude obsessed with Goodfellas, Phillips taking the Scorsese mob movie template and swapping out Guido
gangsters for Yiddish yobbos. Before the credits have rolled we're greeted
with a dramatic flash forward, the screen freeze framing as Teller's
voice-over introduces us to the film's world. There's nary a scene that
isn't accompanied by a predictable needle drop, and exhausted tracks like
'Fortunate Son', 'Jump Around' and 'Sweet Emotion' pop up, as though
Hollywood collectively ordered a 'Greatest Hits of Post-90s Male-Oriented
Cinema' from a late night infomercial.
Most of War Dogs' scenes could be swapped out with sequences from
Pain & Gain, Blow, Lord of War, or any other tale of Americans finding themselves out of their depth in
the criminal underworld. There's the obligatory scene where our heroes
undertake an ill-timed drug trip, a fight in a strip club, and that ultimate
cliché of the angry wife (Ana de Armas) taking off to her mother's
with the kids in tow. Teller and Hill are playing thinly veiled Ray Liotta
and Joe Pesci substitutes, albeit without the violent tendencies, but
War Dogs isn't just a bloodless Goodfellas, it's also a soulless imitation.
War Dogs is on Amazon Prime Video UK
now.
