Skip to main content

Friday Night movies: Todd Phillips's WAR DOGS

 Jonah Hill, Miles Teller, Ana de Armas, Bradley Cooper. Dir. Todd Phillips, Warner Bros., 2016


Have you seen SCARFACE, TOP GUN, GOODFELLAS, BLOW, BLACKHAWK DOWN, LORD OF WAR, BODY OF LIES, AMERICAN HUSTLE, THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, & THE BIG SHORT?

Yes, of course you have. So have I. Which means we've pretty much seen everything WAR DOGS has going for it. That ought not stop people from seeing it, however. If you steal, steal good stuff, and do something cool with it. Todd Phillips does both in WAR DOGS, a highly entertaining, if not wildly original, comedy-crime thriller from 2016.

Having said that, there isn't much else to say. Jonah Hill plays a more alpha version of his character in WOLF OF WALL STREET, fitting his patented shtik into another character who, if not as morally complex as his job would have him be, entertains me for two hours. When I like actors, they have to work hard to bore me. Jonah Hill has yet to bore me. Miles Teller plays a solid, if unremarkable, straight man and his voiceover narration chews up a great deal of exposition without adding much to the film's quality, the usual fate of movie narration. WAR DOGS feels like the 100th espionage-crime-caper project Cooper's appeared in. He doesn't so much phone it in as appear to be doing a friend a favor and giving a few off days to his latest picture.

Reiterating, none of that matters much. WAR DOGS kept me engaged, laughing, well entertained. It makes an ideal Friday Movie, a stylish genre exercise that may not tell us anything new about our amoral times but confirms they continue, without shoving our faces into the bowl while Todd Phillips repeatedly flushes, my big issue with Scorsese & WOLF OF WALL STREET.

As long as people don't approach WAR DOGS expecting some great insight into our new dark age, it works. It's the bane of my depressive life and the joy of my medicated life, a fun fuckin' movie. I cannot ask more of this Friday night than that. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Accidental Franchise: The Rambo movies

 FIRST BLOOD, RAMBO:FIRST BLOOD PT. II, RAMBO III, RAMBO, RAMBO:LAST BLOOD Sylvester Stallone, Brian Denehey, Richard Crenna, David Caruso. Dir. Ted Kotcheff, Tri-Star, 1982 Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Julia Nickson, Martin Kove. Dir. George P. Cosmatos, Tri-Star, 1985 Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna. Dir. Peter MacDonald, Tri-Star, 1988 Sylvester Stallone, Julie Benz, Ken Howard. Dir. Sylvester Stallone, Weinstein Company, 2008 Sylvester Stallone, Paz Vega. Dir. Adrian Grunberg, Lionsgate, 2019 My friend Alice sent me a few movies she got into over the last months. These include Mad Max:Fury Road and The Triplets of Bellevelle, as well as all five of Stallone's Rambo movies. My thoughts on them run below. The problem inherent to the Rambo movies is they each revive a character from a surprise-hit movie, but not his ongoing story, because the first film's genius conceit denied him any backstory. The movies all feature John Rambo, human killing machine, ...
2 comments
Read more

No Return:Stanley Kramer's IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD

 IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD. Spencer Tracy, Ethel Merman, Milton Berle, Mickey Rooney, Sid Caesar. Dir. Stanley Kramer, MGM, 1963 I do not generally write about films I stop watching halfway. What's the point? I either have nothing positive to say about it or was in the wrong mood. In both cases I'm ignorant of its full length to perhaps do it justice. In the case of Stanley Kramer's 1963 comedy smash, however, I feel compelled to make an exception.  My problem with the movie is not my mood, nor disappointment because it's not the movie I once heard. In fact, my biggest problem is that I haven't heard it described in glowing terms, or any, since I was about 9. See, IAMMMMW used to air anually on one or another of the networks, often in December. My parents didn't care for it and never watched it, but my friends watched anytime it aired and talked about it in rapturous terms. Until about 9-10 years old, when it seemed to drop out of conversation, or conv...
Post a Comment
Read more

Unwatched Movie Festival: Walter Hill's Brewster's Millions

 After almost five years of movie collecting, I've become that collector with at least one good stack of stuff I've never watched. I had some reason for buying, but I've never gotten to or never finished some. It's embarrassing. It feels wasteful. Decadence does not come naturally to me.  I've got Grumpy Internet today and I've run "out of" movies, which is to say I depleted the newest stack, not that I'm actually "out of" movies. It will take over a month to run all the way out. What better time to dredge up four likely candidates and watch them? Today's Unwatched Movie Fest entrants: Brewster's Millions Bustin' Loose Harper The Enforcer (1950) Brewster's Millions Richard Pryor, John Candy, Lonette McKee, Hume Cronyn. Dir. Walter Hill, Universal, 1985 Walter Hill would seem a strange choice for a screwball comedy adapted from the same 1902 novel as six other classic pictures, and Brewster's Millions makes...
Post a Comment
Read more