There are plenty of films about the follies of unrestrained capitalism, about the corruption of innocence at the hands of money and big business, or about the idea of war as a business that grinds up anyone in its path in the pursuit of profit. Some overlap one or all of these themes with each other, and the outcomes are sometimes insightful, painful looks into the drama and tragedy of it all, other times absurdist and satirically cynical revelations that still get to the drama and pain. Yet there's an increasingly common approach that translates these sorts of narratives into simplistic, cookie-cutter entertainment posing as thoughtful artistic enterprise, despite even the hard work of many of those involved in the production. War Dogs, a true story of two young men who become arms dealers and engage in widespread fraud and corruption along the way, sadly falls into the latter camp.
Based on a Rolling Stone article that inspired a book (titled Arms and the Dudes), War Dogs comes with a $45 million price tag. It shouldn't have much trouble scoring around $15 million in its domestic bow, based on tracking and the competition against it this weekend. With good word of mouth, it would climb to probably $50+ million domestic and perhaps something similar overseas. A final worldwide tally anywhere between $70 million and perhaps $120 million is possible, depending on how well received it is in foreign markets.
Lord of War, a similarly themed film about arms dealing, took $72 million in global receipts, or about $88 million in today's dollars. The Big Short, meanwhile, managed $133 million as a film taking a look at the corrupt housing market bubble and Wall Street's manipulations in the mid-to-late 2000s. Whether audiences feel War Dogs' story and revelations are relevant enough to cause people to sit up and take notice, and whether its comedic approach has the right appeal combined with the subject matter, will determine which of those other two films is a better comparison in box office terms going forward.
So, is War Dogs worth your money this weekend? Or is it shooting blanks? Read on and find out!
I'm not sure how many more movies we need about "bad boy" capitalists who break the rules while living a rock 'n roll lifestyle (with the obligatory rock 'n roll soundtrack) and learning valuable lessons that prove their humanity and good hearts despite their misdeeds. We are invited to laugh at every excess and every instance of boorish behavior because hey, we all know it's bad and at some point in the film, they'll get their comeuppance anyway, right? Except the slo-mo walk of the protagonists, their "ain't we bada**" swagger amid loud music and action sequence editing, the attempts to get us to sympathize even with their lies and to smile knowingly as they engage technicalities to excuse their criminality, has become so transparent in its intent that there's no point in denying the obvious.
These films all want to mimic Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas or his more recent Wolf of Wall Street, two films that invited us into a sort of secret society of criminality and excess where the charisma of the main parties and the satirical presentation of their lifestyle was never meant to excuse their actions, but rather to let us see them as they saw themselves so we could better understand the underlying forces that allow such things to happen in the first place. At no point does any rational human being think the criminals in those two films are truly admirable or right, and the films cast a distinctly accusing eye toward what's happening.
Not so in War Dogs, a film that tries so hard to keep reminding us the main character has a wife and child whom he really, really does love, and that he really really does feel bad about what he does sometimes, and who it even implies was somehow just caught up in all of this by forces external to himself. His best friend, really, is to blame, right? His best friend came along and seduced this well-meaning, good-hearted family man, and one step closer to the line and one technical justification after another just blurred the distinction between right and wrong, right? And it was all in service to a greater good, the USA needs these things done sometimes and it's better that at least someone with a heart of gold and who felt bad about it was involved, right? And so it goes, on and on.
But it's a film that wants to have it both ways, trying to pretend toward pulling back the curtain to reveal an "ain't it so awful" head-shaking view of the arms trade, while reveling in over the top presentation that tries to make the whole thing feel cool and hip and admirable at the same time. It gives the viewer permission to enjoy it and laugh and idolize those involved, under the pretense it's wagging a finger at everything by the end.
The finger-wagging, however, is too little too late, and in fact, the film takes a decidedly accusatory tone toward those who play a role in actually bringing anybody to justice. Meanwhile, the only reason our main character really faces a moment of crisis about his work is over money -- not even the death of someone he works with and likes causes him to speak out or take any further action, although we get to see his shock and later handwringing about it, to show he's got feelings even if those feelings don't matter in the end. It's the money, that's the only motivation for him throughout everything, and if the film had taken a less sarcastic tone and instead presented the story in a way allowing the corruption of money and monied influence to drive the narrative, it would've been far more effective.
That's the most frustrating thing about War Dogs -- there was potential to tell a compelling, serious story that really gets into the ugly side of arms dealing and the way money corrupts even seemingly ordinary, good people. And the talent involved is enough to have made it something great to see. But the attempt to just stick it into the too-familiar template of bad-boy-capitalists with a rocking soundtrack and soft pedal the main character's responsibilities and personality result in the social relevance and promise of the premise being dead on arrival. It sticks to so many of the standard tropes -- right down to the strip club sequence with half-naked women dancing around in the background, fast-cut shots of people snorting cocaine, lots of too-cool sunglasses, and that soundtrack that in this case is mostly full of lots of older rock despite the fact the film is set in the 2000s (a clear sign of its attempts to mimic Scorsese's films).
There's also a great deal of fictionalization that speaks directly to the attempt to create a more tough, roguish appearance for the characters. Adding an extended series of events requiring the two leads to personally drive a shipment of weapons through the most dangerous territory in Iraq, against international trade agreements, is used only to highlight the extremes they'll go to and how "cool" the soldiers in Iraq supposedly think these two guys are. The danger is presented for humor and to pit the humanity of the leads against the lack of humanity of the Jordanian and Iraqi characters around them. It's just one of many glaring examples of how the film glamorizes the behavior it only half-heartedly pretends to critique on occasion.
It doesn't matter whether you're pro-war, pro-gun, pro-USA, etc or not, or if you're like most people and somewhere in between the extremes on any of the given topics. War Dogs disappoints structurally, it fails to get to deeper ideas and truths that are ripe for exploration in precisely a film of this nature, and it winds up almost a caricature of the very sort of film it tries to emulate.
Box office figures and tallies based on data via Box Office Mojo , Rentrak, and TheNumbers.
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