Jun 24 2008
War Inc review
I’m trying to resharpen my writing skills:
War Inc is a terrible movie, the only redeeming features of which are Marisa Tomei’s smile, Joan Cusack’s facial contortions, Hillary Duff’s russo-whore getup, and a particularly lovable OnStar system.
In War Inc, John Cusack plays his character from Grosse Point Blank, only this time he’s an assassin for a Halliburton/Blackwater stand-in called Tamerlane. Tamerlane, under the direction of Cheney stand-in Dan Akroyd, has recently completed military operations in the first fully outsourced war in a made up county called Turaqistan. The company is mounting a tradeshow called Brand USA to encourage investment in the region, and Cusack’s character, Brand Hauser, is tapped to assassinate the country’s oil company minister, while directing the tradeshow as his cover. At this expo, Yonica Babyyeah (Duff) will marry her boyfriend, a thuggish middle eastern prince. Along the way, he falls in love with journalist Natalie Hegalhuzen (Tomei), shoots a bunch of people, sentences a man to be buried alive under a mountain of goat shit and finds a family. Oh, and Ben Kingsley shows up, because he’s now required to be in every movie shown at the Angelika.
For a movie that wants so badly to be high-brow satire it’s unclear why the movie spends so much time on needless backstory and uninteresting action sequences. What no one realizes is that the main character in this movie shouldn’t have been Cusack’s recently acquired gray streak, but Tamerlane the heartless corporate behemoth. Yes, every piece of military equipment and personnel in the movie is wearing a bright red Tamerlane patch, and yes, it’s funny that the soldiers are hopped up on Tamerlane brand freeze dried coffee squeeze bottles, but that’s all a backdrop to the story of Hauser’s inner demons, his love interests and his redemption. Towards the end of the film, Hauser gets in a Humvee and drives far outside the “Emerald Zone” to a burnt out city where Natalie is being held hostage. He’s literally running away from the center of the satire, to make the point that the safety and redevelopment of the Emerald Zone is a sham — but we knew that already, as evidenced by the repeated bombings inside the city, even without five minutes of Cusack and Tomei stumbling through rubble.
It’s impossible to care about the characters in this movie — Hauser’s existential doubt is predictable, Yonica’s brooding lost-girl sensitivity is predictable (and predicted by Natalie) and the romance between Hauser and Natalie is inevitable from the minute they meet.
The women do their best to save this movie — if Tomei continues in this role, she’ll be the sexy Julia Roberts in a few years. Hillary Duff is really hot, and plays her caricature as well as one could hope. Joan Cusack does that thing where she contorts her face and throws up her hands and screams, and that will never get old. The woman who thinks she’s been shot while in the implanted journalist experience VR simulation is very convincing as well.
If War Inc. was a slower, more focused movie — Idiocracy meets Wag the Dog, it could have been at the very least, cute, and at best, funny and relevant. But instead the movie moves so quickly and absurdly that the jokes feel tacked on and the plot meaningless. The heavy handed liberal bias of this movie isn’t going to convince anyone who isn’t already an opponent of the privatization of the military, but it’s not letting those of us in on the joke laugh much at it.


