War, Inc is a debacle. Starring, co-written and produced by John Cusack, it’s an impotent, cheap-looking political satire that longs for relevance, but feels years stale. (It has, in fact, been around for awhile––it was once titled Brand Hauser, it went into production in fall 2006, it was rumored to have been set up for premiere slots at both Toronto 2007 and Sundance 2008, neither of which, for whatever reason, ever happened.) It’s a sign that Hollywood filmmaking about the current war and its associated politics has fatally passed over from merely irrelevant preaching to the choir, to a kind of solipsistic naivete that should make anyone with an intellectually-rooted anti-war position feel embarrassed to have their politics associated with it. War, Inc personally makes me want to put my head in my hands in shame. The Left deserves to be mocked as much as the Neo-Cons, but nobody deserves to have their reputations sullied by indefensible garbage like this.
Cusack plays Hauser, a hit man in existential crisis who is sent to a fictional, war-torn middle eastern country to lay waste to its leader. As a cover, Hauser pretends to be a conference producer for Tamerlane, a corporation to whom the fighting of war in that zone has been outsourced by the US. Marisa Tomei and Hilary Duff (coated in olive-colored foundation in an attempt to convince that she’s a “Central Asian pop princess”), are the potential love interests. There’s a narrative twist involving the latter actress that the audience figures out about an hour and half before Cusack comes to his own Shocking Realization, which in turn leaves open a gaping plot hole involving that olive-colored foundation. Ultimately, Hauser has a crisis of conscience that prevents him from killing his intended target but mandates the murder of many, many other people, and everyone who remains standing lives happily ever after.
As a brand, John Cuscak is only really saleable when he’s playing a certain kind of romantic anti-hero, and the only thing remotely of interest in War, Inc is the manner in which his persona from countless romantic comedies is recycled into War, Inc’s limp critic of corporatized warfare, virtually without change. The familiar Cusack character is a resolutely single-minded romantic;again and again, this actor has played men for whom nothing is as important as love, who have no goals in life beyond the pursuit and acquisition of a single girl. It’s really bizarre to watch that romantic solipsism transposed into a film that aims to Say Something about a global conflict with potentially apocalyptic implications.
Maybe Cusack’s lefty indignation mandated an attempt at war satire, but for all that this film actually has to say about war profiteering and multi-national relations, it might as well be set in Manhattan. In fact, strip War, Inc of its physical setting and you’ve got an unfunny retread of Grosse Pointe Blank, in which that film’s sexy wink has been swapped out for a thread of family drama that fails to convince. In War Inc’s climax––which is essentially a wholesale replica of the climax of the high school reunion movie, with Ben Kingsley playing Dan Ackroyd and Tomei playing Minnie Driver and 50 or 60 Middle Eastern extras who exist only to be blown away––any sort of political commentary goes out the window. The Cusack character, and the film as a whole, give up on Saying Anything and become chiefly concerned with literally killing off all obstacles in order to abscond with a girl.
With this climax, War, Inc abandons all grounds to claim that its project is truly satirical. As much as something like Zombie Strippers protects itself with the pretense of ironic distance but ultimately offers as much one-dimensional pleasure as a fan of either zombies or strippers could possibly ask for, War, Inc tells us that wanton destruction carried forth in protection of personal interests is bad, and then asks us to indulge in and root for a non-ironic blood bath–and in the B-movie cliches of invincible hitmen and babes toting machine guns–in order to secure the protagonists’ consequence-free escape.
The War, Inc press notes are full of pull quotes from people like Arianna Huffington and Naomi Klein, positioning this star-studded action comedy as a noble work of activism. But like so many contemporary narrative films that intend to grapple with the bungled war in Iraq and the spectre of global terror from a liberal-pacifist perspective, War, Inc has no new point to make, nothing to offer in the way of intellectual insight, no interest in actual ideological dialogue, and it’s certainly not capable of proposing any sort of solution. Films like this and Redacted and Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden exist to make their makers feel good about their political correctness and content that their razor-thin world views are accurate and viable, when in fact they represent a tiny fraction of the bigger picture. This is not activism––this is self-congratulation.
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