The movie culls humor from the absurdity of certain situations and scenarios (not unlike the way Adam McKay generated laughs in the far superior The Big Short). While David wrestles with his conscience and tries to find a way out, Efraim doubles down, betraying pretty much everyone in the process. After securing a major government munitions contract by striking a deal with a less-than-upstanding character (Bradley Cooper) who has all the wrong sorts of contacts, David and Efraim find themselves in over the heads. When David learns that his girlfriend, Iz (Ana de Armas), is pregnant, he needs to find a way to provide for her and their child, and this leads him to accept an offer to go into business with Efraim, whose schemes are becoming increasingly more shady, convoluted, and dangerous. Efraim is a burgeoning arms dealer and David is a message therapist. In the interim, their lives have gone in different directions. The based-on-a-true-story premise is that David re-unites with his high school best friend, Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), some ten years after their last meeting. His inability to anchor War Dogs makes the story less involving than it might have been, turning it into a diverting but by no means indispensable expose of the international arms black market. Instead of coming across as a complex mix of charisma and bile, David is inexcusably bland. However, where Scorsese was able to cultivate the contradictions inherent in the characters of Hill and Belfort, Phillips can’t achieve the same balance with Packouz.
Although the most overt references are to Brian DePalma’s Scarface, Phillips sees Miles Teller’s David Packouz as a conflation of Goodfellas’ Henry Hill and The Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort.
There’s little doubt that Hangover director Todd Phillips is channeling Martin Scorsese. The lack of dynamism and depth in the characters is what hamstrings this production. The problem with War Dogs isn’t the dark humor nor is it the cynically accurate deconstruction of military procurement and corruption.
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