Wolves of War Street: WAR DOGS

A true crime story told like a business school case study, War Dogs is about a reckless pursuit of profit leading straight into fraud and disaster. It’s loosely based on the real story of how two twenty-something college dropouts blustered and hustled their way to millions upon millions of dollars in defense contracts during the first years of the Iraq War. In over their heads, they ultimately cut too many corners and bring about their own downfalls, but not before getting filthy rich providing guns and ammo to fuel the military-industrial complex. Recent history, it’s an object lesson in the downside of an irrepressible entrepreneurial spirit. Director Todd Phillips, trying his hand at drama after making the likes of Old School and The Hangover, pitches the movie at the same coarse bro-centric smarm that powers his comedies. In some ways that’s smart, making the characters’ proud ignorance and irresponsible greed a dead ringer for the dominant political climate of Bush-era foreign policy. But the whole project is too clumsy to really activate what’s most interesting about the story. The good version of this movie is hiding just underneath the bad one, which doesn’t trust the audience to follow along.

It begins when the opportunistic Efraim (Jonah Hill) discovers that the United States has an open bidding process for defense contractors. Using his knowledge of arms dealing he picked up from his shady uncle, he lowballs on small bids the big companies mostly ignore, and then fulfills them through a patchwork of grey-area backchannels and whole sale purchases. Work pours in, so he asks David (Miles Teller), an old schoolmate unhappily working a massage therapist job, to join the scrappy upstart company. As the only employees, they manage to turn a pretty penny. The war is taking off and the government is willing to look the other way if it means saving money on the arms race. Phillips shoots these early scenes like a cross between Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street – with its slick excess and loose morals – and Bay’s Pain & Gain – with dumb guys and big dreams sleazing around Miami Beach cooking up their not-quite-legal plots. That’s compelling enough, with intrigue, double-crosses, and the intoxication of sudden wealth before the hollow pit in the stomach as it threatens to crash down.

There’s something compelling about watching these characters find room in the margins of the defense budget to siphon off some business for themselves, fast-talking generals, cooking the books for audits, and even smuggling weapons into Iraq in a rickety truck with an amusingly blasé local (Shaun Toub). Hill and Teller work well together as a study in contrasts, one moving his bulk like a presumptuous smooth fat cat, the other lean and hungry for any scrap. Hill has a braying laugh and intimidating presence, while Teller is meeker, ready to go along with whatever is happening as long as it means money to support his family. His wife (Ana de Armas) exists in the story only to be extra incentive to make ends meet, and to serve as a moral conscience. She’s not a character, but a symbol. Then again, so are the guys, who enter the picture and leave the picture pretty much the same. The plot progresses, but the movie never deepens their relationships or surprises us with new shadings or complications.

So it’s not a particularly deep or insightful movie, ultimately a fairly shallow treatment of a story that could’ve been a better unraveling of process. Instead Phillips, with co-writers Stephen Chin and Jason Smilovic, steers into his comic instincts, letting Hill and Teller riff and spar and joke. Throughout he adds layers of explanatory text – obvious symbolism, thuddingly on-the-nose jukebox soundtrack spelling out subtext, endless narration, freeze frames, title cards, and affected chapter headings named for lines of dialogue we’ll hear later in the section. It never stops explaining itself, underlining every motivation and walking the audience through every thought process step-by-step. There’s a great story here, and a good cast up to the task of selling the emotional and business throughlines. (Best is a brief appearance by Bradley Cooper, who effortlessly uses every iota of his star power bringing an infamous arms dealer’s notoriety to life.) But the movie can’t step out of its own way and let what’s so inherently interesting play out unimpeded. Phillips provides a terrific surface slickness, but, like Adam McKay’s The Big Short, the result is a movie that is too afraid the audience will miss the point to take full advantage of the material’s potential.

Air Master: THE LAST AIRBENDER

M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, adapted from a well-regarded Nickelodeon cartoon unseen by me, arrives with breathlessly negative reviews. Going into the theater, I was well prepared to witness a complete debacle, wrongheaded in every decision. Having now seen the film, I can only assume that the wave of overwhelming negativity arose from a combination of Shyamalan’s diminished reputation and the reportedly terrible quickie 3D-conversion cash grab applied in post production. I saw the movie in regular old 2D and I still view Shyamalan as a filmmaker of talent and promise. I admire the earnestness he seems to bring to each new project. The Last Airbender is a flawed movie, to be sure, but it’s not nearly as bad as some – okay, most – are saying. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the bad reviews, just their intensity.

I could talk about all the flaws of the film. I could say that the acting is wooden, the dialogue is weak, the exposition is burdensome and omnipresent, and the rules of the fantasy world are poorly explained. That’s all true, but I’d rather start by talking about what I liked about the film, which has plenty of matinee charm. Shyamalan conjures an interesting fantasy world (even though I assume he lifted it faithfully from the cartoon series). It’s a place where different tribes worship different elements. The special among them, the benders, can control these elements. The plot of the movie concerns the reappearance of, in the form of a young boy, a special bender who can control all of the elements. The fire people, who have long ago slaughtered the air people, rule cruelly over the water, and earth people. This special boy threatens to overthrow the ruling fire people and bring about a more harmonious existence for all of the elements and their people. Naturally, the fire people want to stop him.

It’s in the not-so-grand tradition of the mid-80’s explosion of post-Star Wars fantasy-based copycats like The Beastmaster and Willow. Though, granted, The Last Airbender is better than the former and about on par with the latter. The movie is fairly typical fantasy stuff about tribes and kingdoms, warring factions, Chosen Ones and magical powers. But Shyamalan has a good eye for composing interesting shots and a good sense of pacing. The movie looks good and moves nicely. (It’s even blessed with a very likable score from James Newton Howard). I enjoyed admiring the costumes, creatures, and vehicles, especially a many-legged flying beast and strange steam-powered battleships, which are used by the people of the film’s universe. I liked their powers and the ways in which they are used; tendrils of water and bursts of fire pop nicely in the slick style of the production (at least in 2D). It’s a nicely rendered place that seems consistent with its own rules, and Shyamalan renders it with his typically excellent use of space and focus.

But those rules are also a big problem. Shyamalan doesn’t lay them out clearly or efficiently. Instead, exposition weighs heavy on every scene, coming unceasingly and not often convincing or palatable. It’s enough to give a viewer mental indigestion while trying to process every new back-story, legend, and piece of magical know-how. It all feels just strange enough to need additional decoding and just familiar enough to not need any points belabored. Of course, Shyamalan isn’t helped by having an especially wooden cast of central protagonists any more than the cast is helped by having to recite his creaky dialogue. The young bender at the film’s center, played by newcomer Noah Ringer, fits the look of the part but adds little else, adrift in the condensed silliness. He’s given help by a couple of young water people (Nicola Peltz and Jackson Rathbone) who also do little more than read lines and stare off at the effects. The older members of the cast fare a bit better. I particularly enjoyed the attempts at scenery-chewing villainy from dependable character actors Cliff Curtis and Shaun Toub as well as Dev Patel (of Slumdog Millionaire) and Aasif Mandvi (a current Daily Show correspondent).

On the whole, The Last Airbender is not a film worthy of intense scorn. It’s a pleasant fantasy adventure that’s messy, goofy, and deeply flawed, yes, and it’s probably not as good as its source material, but it’s hardly the worst movie of the year. It’s not even the worst movie in wide release this weekend. I like what Shyamalan’s up to with this film, with his attempt to branch out from small-scale character-driven supernatural thrillers and get into epic mythmaking of a grander design. It works more than it doesn't if you approach it at its level.