“War Dogs” is a true-crime buddy comedy about two entitled Florida twentysomethings whose mutual sense of boundless greed took them on a wild and dangerous journey, one where they sold high-grade military artilleries to the United States armed forces, plus some other, shall we say, less scrupulous parties. It’s a movie that makes an almost fatal miscalculation in its early goings: it’s cynical without being particularly smart about its cynicism. The screenplay is filled with profane tirades that rail against the stupidity of the average American, as well as nuts-and-bolts breakdowns of the profession it’s depicting. This cocktail might suggest something possessing the unhinged docudramatic thrills of, say, Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas”. Alas, “War Dogs” is no “Goodfellas,” and Todd Phillips — director of the “Hangover” trilogy — is no Martin Scorsese. Instead, this trifling farce is a sour, mostly depressing slog through increasingly unpleasant material that has neither the laughs to justify its conceptual irresponsibility, nor the dramatic staying power to excuse the screenplay’s appalling lack of originality.
Weirdly enough, Todd Phillips actually has a background in documentary. Phillips’ first big credit was “Frat House,” a look at the cruel rituals of modern campus life that would thematically foreshadow some of the director’s early work in features. He also directed another terrific documentary about G.G. Allin, one of punk rock’s most savage and notorious stage icons. It’s easy to see what might have attracted Phillips to the “War Dogs” story. Taking its inspiration a Rolling Stone editorial titled “Arms and the Dudes” (which was the movie’s working title), “War Dogs” contains a great many details that feel too absurd, too completely divorced from reality to be actually, empirically true. It has all the makings of a great black comedy, at least on paper. What “War Dogs” needs is a director who understands the cosmic joke of its premise. Phillips has a gift for broad physical comedy that is undeniable, as anyone who’s seen his shamelessly funny “Old School” — a frat-boy epic about middle-aged himbos cluelessly pining for their glory years — can attest to. His problem is that he’s so often enamored with the bad behavior of his heterosexual dude-bro protagonists that he never gets too deep beneath their surfaces. In a purposefully lightweight movie like “Road Trip,” the teen sex comedy that posited Phillips as a big name in Hollywood, this isn’t as much of an issue. In a movie that purports to be something more ambitious, something with a little more heft, it’s problematic.
A strangely wooden Miles Teller stars as David Packouz, a bland, pot-smoking Miami Everydude who makes ends meet giving rich old lechers massages for seventy-five bucks an hour. In movies such as Michael Bay’s “Pain and Gain” and Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” — the latter of which “War Dogs” seeks badly to emulate, though Scorsese’s movie had a firm handle on its tone, and didn’t exactly mind if we hated its characters — there is no greater sin than not making money, because in this dodgy, black-and-white universe, lack of income equals lack of manhood. Surreptitiously, David is hit with the news of a pregnancy from his beautiful and patient wife Iz (Ana de Armas, filling the thankless role of the nagging spouse in a Todd Phillips movie) almost exactly at the same point in which he has a chance run-in with his old childhood best friend (and at a funeral, no less). Said best friend is Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), a fast-talking, spray-tanned hustler with the physique of the Goodyear blimp and the laugh of a teenager who’s just smoked weed for their first time. Efraim is incorrigible, vulgar, prone to insulting everyone in his immediate eyeline and more than a little deluded. In other words, he’s the typical, unbridled Todd Phillips id (think Will Ferrell in “Old School,” or Zach Galifinakis in the “Hangover” flicks) to Teller’s dull, straight-arrow bro guy. He’s also, by the way, an international arms dealer, albeit one who makes his bones by picking up the crummy weapons contracts that other, more legitimate arms suppliers are more inclined to pass over.
Hill’s performance is the one element of “War Dogs” that truly, unquestionably works. He’s terrifying and unpredictable and real in all the ways that the movie itself could never wish to be. Efraim is such a world-class sociopath that, after a while, it becomes impossible to tell when he’s telling the truth, or if he ever is. Unfortunately, this turns out to be the movie’s sole dramatically engaging element. Talented actors like Bradley Cooper and Kevin Pollack show up in bit roles, but their expressions and demeanors seem grim, forced: like they’re here more out of contractual obligation than anything resembling a genuine desire to work on a potentially interesting project.
Nevertheless, Hill is a force here: a spiked dynamo cocktail of naked insecurity, homoerotic need and psychotic wigger posturing that accounts for nearly all of the movie’s scattered, measly laughs. I’ve sometimes called Hill’s skills as a dramatic actor into question — I certainly did in my review for the Hill and James Franco-starring “True Story,” which felt like a tepid attempt to imitate the stately gloom of “Foxcatcher” director Bennett Miller — but the young actor’s gifts as a clown cannot be denied. As he did with his Donnie Azoff in “Wolf of Wall Street,” Hill turns Efraim into one of 2016’s most memorable screen sleazeballs, even if the rest of Phillips’ movie can’t possibly hope to match him. He’s certainly better than Mr. Teller, who mostly just squints when he’s trying to convey deep thought and reacts to his co-star’s increasingly buffoonish displays of outrage.
There’s probably a more biting, angry, genuinely intelligent movie to be mined from this sordid material, but “War Dogs,” sadly, is not it. It’s certainly less of an endurance test than Phillips’ nearly-unwatchable “Hangover” sequels, though that is admittedly a low bar to clear. What bugged me the most about “War Dogs” was its giddily soulless worldview: its juvenile belief that people are inherently suckers, and that why shouldn’t two white, straight, unexceptional American dudes profit off the suffering and death of others? Relax, bro: it’s just foreign policy.
The movie struggles to genuinely embrace its amorality, but its edge is forced. With the exception of Hill’s fantastic, lived-in performance, “War Dogs” is a movie that wants to present itself as an incensed indictment of American Idiocy, but is instead an indulgence in exactly the same thing. Unlike “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which expertly navigated a kind of tightrope act in regards to its loathsome but undeniably charismatic lead character, “War Dogs” affords us no such critical distance from its repellent principal specimens, and the result is a movie that has no idea how to feel about the two people occupying its center. The fact that this movie contains what looks to be an earnest cameo from social media party boy Dan Bilzerian ends up telling you a lot about the finished product.
On the other end of the comic spectrum is Taika Waititi’s “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” a good-hearted oddball fable about a foster child with a huge personality who escapes into the New Zealand bush with a beard-wearing Sam Neill. If the mood of Mr. Phillips’ movie is mean-spirited and oddly self-congratulatory, “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” is gentle and loving, building to a heart-swelling climax that blends goofball action movie thrills with a surprising degree of pathos.
“Hunt for the Wilderpeople” is the latest exhibit of the New Zealand school of Droll Comedy, prominent examples of which include the cult classic HBO series “Flight of the Conchords” and vampire mockumentary “What We Do In The Shadows,” both projects that Waititi had a significant hand in. “Wilderpeople” sags a bit in its middle section, but for the most part, Waititi’s latest is an unapologetic crowd-pleaser that makes a serious case for the director’s crossover appeal from film-snob audiences and into the mainstream.
Waititi seems to enjoy mucking about within established genre blueprints and digging around for discarded details in the gutters where other directors might not think to look. The director also possesses a clever knack for demystifying clichés and inverting them in sublime and unexpected ways. “Flight of the Conchords,” in which Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie starred as New Zealand’s premiere acoustic pop/rock/folk/funk duo, presented the idea of a modern rock band who were totally un-sexy, totally-un-cool, frequently struggling to make ends meet and unable to even purchase fruit from their local corner stand without some minor hassle. Similarly, Waititi’s previous film “What We Do In The Shadows” presented us with vampires who were neurotic, petty and unlucky in love: their bone-dry repartee was not of centuries-old ghouls hellbent on drinking human blood, but rather that of longtime housemates who’ve grown to resent each other but are much too polite to actually show it.
The blessing of all this hip self-awareness is that I believe Waititi genuinely loves these genres that he’s choosing to burrow into. Like Edgar Wright, he’s just putting his own defiantly eclectic, hyper-formalist film nerd stamp on them. “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” might be his sweetest and most enjoyable cinematic mixtape to date: a twee frontier survival tale, like “The Revenant” as seen through the symmetrical dollhouse frames of Wes Anderson. The end result is every bit as bizarre as it sounds, and I found the movie as a whole riotously enjoyable. Simultaneously a big-hearted family comedy, a rollicking outdoor adventure and a kind of cracked fairy tale about a boy and the man who comes to be his uncle, guardian and best friend all rolled into one, “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” is another winner from Waititi, and further confirmation that his is a directorial voice worth being excited about.
The wonderful young Julian Dennison stars as Ricky Baker, our reluctant hero. Ricky is a mouthy, charming, hefty-framed orphan decked out in a gangster rap wardrobe, whose suspiciously sullen poker face hints at years of neglect and sorrow. Don’t let the kid’s mug fool you, though: Ricky’s no sad-sack. In fact, he’s a devious and cunning trouble-maker, who’s known for offenses ranging from graffiti and spitting in public to simply “burning stuff” and “throwing stuff”. There have been plenty of movie kids throughout history and even a few in 2016, but Dennison here is so downright lovable as the hell-raising Ricky Baker that I wouldn’t mind seeing him anchor a potential “Widlerpeople” sequel (and weirdly enough, the movie’s finale leaves that possibility wide open).
Early on in the story, two humorless bureaucrats from Child Protective Services drop Ricky off at the secluded country cabin of Hector (Sam Neill) and Bella (Rima Te Wiata). He’s gruff and unemotive, she’s a veritable fountain of maternal affection. After tragedy strikes and Hector decides to head off into the bush on contemplate what’s left of his life, Ricky and his new doggy pal 2pac end up tagging along. Ricky, Hector and 2pac’s jaunt into the unknown wilderness ends up prompting manhunt of epic proportions, not to mention some Indie Movie 101 soul-searching and a handful of properly adorable hunting montages. All the while, Ricky and Hector — or “Hec,” as he implores the young boy to call him after a while — develop a begrudging respect for one another that is hilarious in a broad, off-key manner, and sometimes even downright affecting.
For his next directorial effort, Waititi will step into the realm of Marvel films and helm the third “Thor” flick, “Ragnarok”. While I’m undeniably excited at the prospect, I’m also a bit nervous: I’d hate to see Waititi’s light touch and his undeniably unique vision processed, like so much inedible supermarket meat, into an end result that resembles the bludgeoning, wonderless likes of “Captain America: Civil War”. And yet something tells me that Waititi, like the characters and worlds he is prone to creating, is truly pure of heart. There’s a sense of exuberance and a real innocence in “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” that I found absolutely delightful, even when the movie lands with an occasional dud joke or hasty visual transition. The result turns out to be quite a rare thing indeed: a movie for parents and children that neither dumbs down its jokes or its central story, but is also fundamentally accessible and (I would think) enjoyable for youngsters and grown-ups of all ages.
Grades: “War Dogs,” C-. “Hunt for the Wilderpeople,” B+.
