Respond to these rapid questions in our War Dogs quiz and we will tell you which War Dogs character you are. Play it now.
“War Dogs” is a film about horrible people who, despite their horribleness, refuse to accept their horribleness. There are too many scenes that could have caused moral turbulence in films like “Scarface,” “Goodfellas,” and “The Wolf of Wall Street”—to name a few excellent films about guys who get high on drugs and the adrenaline rush of living outside the law, and which “War Dogs” frequently references—but they are always softened by Hollywood special pleading: “Scarface,” “Goodfellas,” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” are all excellent films about guys who get high Aren’t these gentlemen endearing and amusing? Do you not appreciate what wonderful friends they are? Isn’t their audacity something to be admired? Look at how distressed the hero appears to be; don’t you feel sorry for him?
Todd Phillips (the “Hangover” trilogy) would appear to be an ideal, or at the very least promising, choice to tell the story of a couple of pipsqueak Miami arms dealers who make a fortune supplying guns and bullets to the US military during the height of the Bush administration’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, the film’s director and co-writer has yet to be determined. However, “War Dogs,” which is based on a Rolling Stone article and a subsequent book by Guy Lawson, lacks the conviction necessary to stand up for what it believes. The tonal range is all over the place. It appears to stare pitilessly at its hero and narrator, former massage therapist and bed sheet dealer turned arms trafficker David Packouz (Miles Teller), and his friend and boss Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), and recognize them as greedy, expedient men who are only concerned with fattening their bank accounts at times in the film. It also appears to be overly concerned with whether David and Efraim will remain friends once things go awry—as if the film were a straightforward, un-ironic buddy flick about badas$ dudes doing badas$ things, sometimes in slow motion, rather than an increasingly twisted and conflicted parody of the genre.
Furthermore, “War Dogs” only ever shows Iz (Ana de Armas), David’s barely-developed wife, reacting to her husband’s lies and deception as a voice of conscience, never as anything more than that. Whenever the film focuses on Iz and David’s marital difficulties, it confirms the film’s softer tone. The film exposes its sweet-cream Hollywood center every time it asks us to care deeply about whether David will lose Iz—who at various points chastises David for his dishonesty, then supports him, then turns against him again, always according to the needs of the plot at the time. These two aren’t Henry and Karen Hill in the least.
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“Wolf of Wall Street,” directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Jonah Hill, drew criticism for portraying its wheeler-dealer protagonists as entertaining as they were morally repulsive; however, that was part of the film’s design, and whether you thought Scorsese and writer Terence Winter succeeded or failed, it was clear that you were supposed to feel conflicted about the characters and question whether you should be having fun watching them get over. You were immersed in the hero’s power trip fantasy before feeling the sting of reality slapping him in the face, which was an interesting take on the attraction-repulsion strategy employed by gangster films. “War Dogs” retains the Scorsesean arrogant-macho banter (which, thanks to the relaxed interplay between Hill and Teller, can be quite amusing), but it does away with the ugly undertow that makes non-sociopathic viewers feel slightly dirty for being so excited. The in-depth breakdowns of the fine points of arms deals come across as a guns-and-ammo version of hedge fund guys bragging about a good investment.
War Dogs Quiz
The decision to use a particular storyteller is a significant part of the film’s problem. His real-life counterpart, who served as a technical advisor and made a cameo appearance in the film, is shown to be a virtual blank, almost as blank as his poor wife. Efraim is a nice guy who was just going about his business when Satan showed up in the form of Efraim, rather than a quick study who ditched his two day jobs and was able to manage a business that would soon be worth millions of dollars based on Beretta pistols and AK-47 shells purchased on the cheap and shipped into war zones in a matter of weeks.
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The best thing about “War Dogs” is Hill’s portrayal of Efraim, who is a complex character. In my opinion, no one since the late, great Chris Penn has done a better job of portraying blobby, sarcastic, volatile men than this actor, and he does an excellent job here, using the character’s squeaky laugh as an exclamation point at the end of a tense scene and allowing us to see the calculations taking place in Efraim’s reptilian brain by allowing his eyes to become cloudy. There are times when you can pinpoint the precise moment when Efraim decides to betray or destroy someone; this usually occurs when Efraim is adamant about his commitment to loyalty and trust. With Efraim at the center of the story, “War Dogs” might have come closer to its apparent goal of being a scathing, Scorsesean take on arms dealing during the War on Terror—half madcap comedy, half exposé—than it has so far gotten. To put it another way, it would have defended itself against claims that it is a safe film about a potentially dangerous subject. Efraim is a slobbish but confident con artist who trudges through life in baggy leisure wear and expensive sunglasses, bolstering his ego with money and guns and telling David, “I’m the best con artist in the world.” “I’m not a supporter of war. The war is currently in progress. This [business] is pro-money in every sense of the word.” At one point, he even refers to himself as a “ugly American” in front of an Iraqi, blatantly claiming a stereotype that he is well aware he embodies from head to toe himself.
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There’s a strong sense that Efraim is fully aware of who he is but has chosen not to be concerned about it, a scenario that’s significantly more terrifying than all of the scenes in which David is concerned that Efraim has gone too far but is still too good a friend to abandon him. Every time Efraim appears onscreen, both the audience and the film are forced to deal with him on some level. The film, on the other hand, chooses to cling to David and accept his exculpatory narration at face value, as if both Phillips and the audience are as gullible as Iz is in the film.
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By employing various formal techniques (chatty narration, scary-funny violence, freeze-frames, and so on), Phillips subtly references “Goodfellas,” to the point where you have to accept the notion that David is a twenty-something version of Henry Hill in the twenty-first century. However, “War Dogs” lacks the visually stunning spectacle and electrifying coldness that distinguish Scorsese’s gangster-scumbag films. In addition, unlike in the best narrated Scorsese films, you never get the impression that the narrator is slanting things to make himself appear more glamorous or less culpable in the horror than he actually was (as exemplified in the “Goodfellas” scene where Hill calmly describes the ramifications of a mob footsoldier killing a waiter on a whim, but the movie shows us closeups of the character looking appalled and distressed).
While “War Dogs” wants us to accept David as he is, the film portrays him as a nice guy who made a few mistakes and got himself into a bit of trouble before coming to his senses, but who is still fundamentally decent. In the end, he comes across as a person who is only guilty of loving and trusting his friend, and there’s little in the film to suggest that this isn’t the entire story. Efraim, on the other hand, comes across as more of an outrageous, hot-tempered clown than a grubby visionary pig whose lack of education and refinement is overshadowed by the cunning of a predator. The film elevates him to the status of glorified comic relief, making him so amusing that he can’t be properly frightening. In the first “Hangover,” the majority of the characters appeared to be more disreputable and unpredictable than this guy, and Phillips didn’t seem to care whether or not we liked them as long as we found them amusing and interesting; here, he wants us to like his slimy people as well—or, at the very least, the film wants us to like David and root for him to keep his friendship with Efraim and win back Iz’s affection. It’s a brief statement in David’s defense that occasionally sounds as if it was written by David himself.
For more personality quizzes check this: How To Be Single Quiz.
