War, Inc. (2008)

I'd like to begin my review by thanking John Cusack for taking the time to write such a convincing review anonymously to try to trick people into watching this "comedy" film. I picked this movie as a gag gift for my brother from the dollar bin, since it was a blatant rip off of the movie "Lord of War" which is truly a quality, underrated film, and I figured it may be good for a laugh. After watching, I have such regret at the loss of a dollar and over an hour of precious time. I truly have no idea what other positive reviewers saw that I did not grasp, the acting and script were so painful, the plot so convoluted, the violence so pointless, and none of the jokes funny. Please do not make my mistake and watch this film, unless you just want to see Hilary Duff dressed in very sexy clothing or if you have the hots for John Cusack. If the idea of a film exposing American weapons used in foreign wars and the ethical dilemmas faced by those involved with this business PLEASE I beg you watch "Lord of War" instead! It has Ethan Hawke and Jared Leto! Anyway, I just wrote because the next time I pick a movie with the intent to laugh at it's ridiculousness, I only hope some kind soul might have posted a review to warn me if it's a total bomb like this film was. Thank you for reading.

This 2008 movie hits all my buttons for a satire. Some might call it a black comedy. Directed by Joshua Seftel, it was written by Mark Leyner, Jeremy Pikser, and John Cusack. It stars John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Hillary Duff, Marisa Tomei, Ben Kingsley, and Dan Akroyd.The gist of the movie is that hit man Hauser (played by John Cusack) has been assigned to assassinate the president of some middle eastern country with a made up name. The satire begins when Hauser lands there. The country is being run by an American corporation called Tamerlane. All the occupying soldiers are Tamerlane mercenaries, the equipment is owned by Tamerlane (which sells ads on the sides of its tanks, by the way), and the country basically is occupied by the corporation. Everyone gets a Tamerlane corporate gift bag, including a book entitled "How I Conquered the World and Dealt with Issues with my Father."I won't go into how well the movie nails corporate scumbaggery, occupation by corporate alter egos, and the like. It nails it. Joan Cusack is brilliant. The commercialization of the war in this godforsaken country is funny, and "War, Inc." spoofs all those dumb action movies where the action hero's wife is killed and his daughter is kidnapped: it happened to Hauser twenty years ago, and he has no clue who did it or why or where his daughter is. And he does nothing about it. Nothing. For some reason, "War, Inc." didn't get a great release and was quickly shunted to DVD. (No conspiracies here, though, about corporations censoring the movie.) It got seriously bad reviews. (Of course, there were no corporations putting the kibosh on it, making newspapers require bad reviews from their critics.) I'm not sure what the reason was. I think it's a great movie; see it with a decent sound system for all the booms.On another note, I see this movie as the final film in a Cusack trilogy. My suggestion is that it starts with "Say Anything," where Cusack is paired with Iona Skye. Dobler is a high school grad with nothing going for him. Released in 1989, in "Say Anything" our hero's goal in life is maybe to open a gym and be a kick boxer. Skye plays Dobler's love interest, Diane Court, who's the school's valedictorian on her way to college and a life of brainy success. It has that iconic scene where Dobler stands outside her window holding the boombox over his head as it plays "In Your Eyes."My alternate universe point of view is that Lloyd Dobler went from being a kick boxer to being Martin Q. Blank in "Grosse Pointe Blank." Blank, of course, is a professional assassin who goes to his high school reunion to see his old high school flame (played by Minnie Driver). In "Grosse Pointe Blank" Joan Cusack plays his totally over the top secretary, and Dan Akroyd plays another assassin. Alan Arkin plays Blank's psychiatrist, and those scenes are fabulous. Blank has been assigned a hit during the time of his reunion, and we get to see a lot of conflict as Blank meets his old friends who've led boringly normal lives while he's been killing people. In "War, Inc." Cusack plays a character named Hauser, Joan Cusack plays his totally over the top assistant, and Dan Akroyd plays a vice president. Instead of an analyst, Hauser has "GuideStar," a disembodied voice to talk him through his several problems based apparently on GM's navigation service. (Bill Cusack, brother of John and Joan, plays the "overcaffeinated" soldier delivering the dry-cleaning in "War, Inc.," by the way, and a waiter in "Grosse Pointe Blank.")

As the title suggests, "War, Inc." is a satire about the "business" that is war, in particular the American propensity for bombing a Middle Eastern country to smithereens (i.e., Iraq and Afghanistan), then exploiting it for everything it's worth – all in the name of "democracy." In this particular case, it is the fictional nation of Turaqistan, which the U.S. has recently invaded and where it is now contracting out all its security and reconstruction services to a private corporation called Tamerlane, modeled, none too subtly, on Halliburton and KBR.John Cusack stars as Brand Hauser, a covert operator working under the auspices of the former vice-president of the United States (Dan Akroyd), whose mission is to take out the CEO of an oil company at a gala wedding reception that Brand himself is supposed to organize. While in the "safe zone" - known in common parlance as the Emerald City - Brand meets his high-strung assistant (played by Cusack's real-life sister Joan), the promiscuous celebrity bride (the typecast Hilary Duff), a fellow hit man (Ben Kingsley) who has some personal issues with Brand, and Natalie Hegalhuzen (Marisa Tomei), a liberal reporter from the Nation, who is there to expose the multinational skullduggery and corruption taking place in the country – or as she affectionately calls it "a democracy on the march land-grab." Written by Cusack, Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser and directed by Joshua Seftel, "War, Inc." is a largely hit-and-miss affair, with moments of insight and humor alternating with moments of silliness and juvenalia. And as with many films of this type, its air of knowingness occasionally slips over into smugness. Yet, though it feels kind of slapdash and doughy at times, the movie ultimately achieves that artful mixture of the serious and the trivial that is the essence of absurdity. And the Ennio Morricone-flavored score by David Robbins gives the movie the flip, hip air it needs to be effective.Not a homerun, exactly, but at least a solid double.

The people who made this monstrosity all deserve to get shot in the face by Dick Cheney. It is a dumb, ridiculously caricatured, snotty little mishmash of cartoonish criticisms badly aimed at President George W. Bush and Iraq. Whenever you hear Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or other conservatives whining about Hollywood liberals, films like War, Inc. are exactly what they mean.Brand Hauser (John Cusack) is an assassin in a black suit who's been given a new assignment. He's to go to the Middle Eastern nation of Turaqistan and kill a businessman who's threatening U.S. interests in the region. Hauser is also supposed to be running a trade show that's showing off the latest products of Tamerlane, the company that's been put in charge of rebuilding Turaqistan after invading it with a mercenary army. Oh, and Hauser is supposed to make sure that global pop sensation Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff) gets married to her Turaqi fiancée. While doing all that, he also finds time to romance a leftist journalist named Natlie Hegalhuzen (Marisa Tomei), who's come to Turaqistan to expose what's going on in the country. That's all I'm going to tell you about the plot of this movie because remembering even that much is giving me post traumatic stress flashbacks.Basically, War, Inc. is supposed to be a satire about the U.S. occupation in Iraq and the use of private military contractors as an instrument of American foreign policy. That's what it's supposed to be. What it actually is, is an insultingly awful, nonsensical, arrogant, self-righteous, 107 minute long fart of a film. The story is beyond stupid. The characters have all the depth of pudding skin that's been left out in the Sun to dry. The humor is cringe-inducingly unfunny. The satire has all the bite of a toothless meth addict. The movie's portrayal of Arabs would be racist if it weren't so incompetent that you can't be sure what you're seeing. Even the sets and the costumes look cheap, like they were borrowed from a VH1 dating show. Every second you watch this movie is like getting slapped in the face with a stinky catfish. Every moment you listen to this film is like hearing puppies crying. I actually couldn't view War, Inc. all the way through in a single sitting. I had to stop halfway through, pop myself some popcorn and have a drink of water because it felt like my brain was going to seep out of my ears.Joan Cusack gives the worst performance of her career in this rotting turkey. If a Joan Cusack sex tape ever comes out, I'm sure she'll do a better acting job in that than she does in War, Inc. Hilary Duff is so terrible, this role should end her career. I don't just mean as an actress. Based on her work here, she should never be hired again to act, sing, write, direct or even work security at a studio lot. The only job she should be able to get is something in the field of medical waste disposal.The only way I could make it through this movie without killing myself was to squint really, really, really, really hard and pretend that the Cusacks and Dan Aykroyd were making a sequel to Gross Pointe Blank where Martin Blank was having a very bad acid trip.The only people who should like War, Inc. are George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice. That's because compared to the pretentious jackasses who made this movie, they don't look all that bad. Sarah Palin shouldn't have spent the 2008 campaign telling voters that Barack Obama "pal'd around with terrorists". She should have said he pal'd around with these filmmakers. She and John McCain would have won in a landslide.