'War Dogs' Is A Bro-comedy That Feels Flimsy

WAR DOGS

“Honestly, we were out of our league,” says Miles Teller, the affable everyman who’s found himself in the middle of a million-dollar gun-running operation despite being wholly unqualified and largely clueless. The same sentiments apply to War Dogs’ writer/director, Todd Phillips. Phillips is, essentially, the maker of frat-boy —and aging frat-boy— comedies: having come to fame with Old School, then ascended to power with the Hangover trilogy. The thought of him taking that comic shtick to a true tale of two stoned Jewish kids from Florida ending up at the centre of an arms-trading scandal sounds like it could work: the warmongering goldrush of “Dick Cheney’s America” tragedy turned comedy by time.

But, amidst some of the most trenchant themes of the century —the globalisation and privatisation of the military industrial complex— Phillips is out of his league. Rather than exploring the many moral grey-zones of the story, we’re instead presented with the most simplified cinematic morality: Jonah Hill is a spray-tanned, hair-gel’d dick who, living out his Scarface fantasies, will fuck over anyone and everyone in zealous pursuit of his limitless greed. And Teller just happens to be his friend. He’s, otherwise, a nice guy with upstanding morals and an improbably-hot, anti-war girlfriend (Ana de Armas) who ends up pregnant by the end of the first act.

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Thus, Teller —just wanting to provide for his family!— ends up smuggling a cache of guns across the border from Jordan into Iraq, and touring Soviet-era strongholds of gathered weapons in Albania. He also ends up making lots of money, and Phillips so delights in the things-are-going-great montages —Matching Porsches! Bought condos! Lines of coke! Firing semi-automatic weapons in slow-motion whilst semi-ironic classic-rock hits play!— he seems to be selling weapons-trafficking as a great career opportunity.

The results feel like an odd combination of cobbled-together Scorsese clichés, scenes built on the twitchy comic banter of the two leads, and after-school-special-worthy ‘teaching’ moments where Teller has to learn the film’s great moral: don’t lie to your girl, even if you’re in Albania repackaging endless crates of ancient Chinese ammunition as new AK-47 rounds. It’s hard not to see such stock storytelling and wonder what a better filmmaker would’ve made of War Dogs' stranger-than-fiction true story. Instead, Phillips’ attempt to make something weightier feels flimsy, delivering another bro-comedy that plays like male fantasy.

THE SHALLOWS

The Shallows is a lean, mean B-movie —bikini-clad Blake Lively vs. a man-eating shark— that could’ve been plenty leaner, much meaner. It’s a bare-bones survival-thriller in which Lively, all blonde tresses and blinding-white teeth, is a surfer-girl undertaking a dead-mom-inspired pilgrimage to a hidden Mexican cove. Catching some new-age waves, she becomes the victim of a shark-attack, and ends up —bleeding, leg growing gangrenous— stranded on a rock 200 yards from the deserted beach. The so-close-yet-so-far proximity to the shore is in keeping with the essential screenplay theme: how tiny moments of fate can trap you in a disaster, how thin the line between survival and demise.

A more artful riff on this set-up would’ve kept the perspective limited to Lively’s: the distance to the shore, and the closeness of a circling shark, moored to her view of the world, and the fight-for-survival she’s found herself in. The in-story presence of a GoPro camera suggests another take on the same set-up: a Blair Witch-ing of a shark attack. But, director Jaume Collet-Serra —fresh off a run of B-movie Liam Neeson action-thrillers— harbours directorial restlessness, and a disinterest in taking viewers too close to grim reality. Collet-Serra’s camera hovers above at helicopter-height, plunges underwater, returns to land, rides the waves; moving as restlessly, as endlessly, as a shark. Treating the picturesque, NSW-posing-as-Mexico-exteriors with lurid colour-grading and a dash of digital-polish, The Shallows doesn’t make the beach look like a nightmare, but a picture-book fantasy; the film’s visual sheen so far from reality that it becomes surreal.

That perception is only added to by the shark, a malleable CGI monster that succeeds far better when it’s an unseen source of fear than it does when it takes centre-frame as toothy vision of terror. Anytime the camera plunges beneath the waves to come face-to-face with the shark, the air of suspense turns into blown bubbles. The shark becomes a ridiculous villain with its own back-story(!): it was once hooked by humans, so is now filled with anti-human rage. And, so, ol’ sharky becomes singularly obsessed with hunting down one blonde girl even when there’s plentiful whale-meat nearby, and even after it has been momentarily set on fire. In the end, The Shallows drums up such hysterical, fear-mongering stigmatisation of sharks that it feels like the work of the Western Australian government.

A HOLOGRAM FOR THE KING

Sticking All-American Tom Hanks in the Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia seems like a recipe for fish-out-of-water comedy. Instead, Tom Tykwer’s adaptation of Dave Eggers’ long-form lament for American outsourcing is yet another cinematic tale of a middle-aged male pulling himself out of a mid-life malaise.

Beginning with an ironic riff on Talking Heads’ Once In A Lifetime, Hanks plays a victim of economic collapse whose job, car, house, and marriage all vanish in a puff of smoke. Taking a job pitching a vague economic something-or-other to the Saudi King sounds glamorous, but is an end-of-the-line scenario. Sitting in a tent at the site of a planned city —glittering, unreal buildings like an architectural model at 1:1 scale; model condos a Potemkin Village façade emblazoned with corporate buzzwords— he’s forever waiting for the king, thwarted by bureaucracy. Deep in the desert, and in a foreign culture, Hanks has retreated as some mixture of last chance, penance, and escape.

Of course, eventually the desert will turn into a middle-aged-male oasis. Here, Ol’ Tom can get his life back on track by befriending a host of sometimes-wacky locals and banging Sarita Choudhury. At its worst, A Hologram For The King brings back painful, repressed memories of Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown. But, thanks to the source-text, there’s a depth to the themes, and to the middle-aged-malaise clichés. Tykwer finds places amidst the forward-thrust of the narrative to digress into the past; to swim in flashbacks and memories.

The result is pleasing, but pat. Tykwer’s vision of Saudi Arabia —itself a mirage conjured in Morocco and Egypt— plays too much like an exotic backdrop. Its wild vistas, glittering buildings, construction sites, and camels serve as a stage for a man turning his life around, impressing his young-adult daughter as he does. Hanks gives a great Hanksy performance in the lead: his aw-shucks affability riddled with passive-aggressiveness; his anxiety forever below the surface; his wounds always visible. It’s fine work, but A Hologram For The King is, ultimately, just fine.

INDIGNATION

The bare-bones of Indignation are boilerplate coming-of-age stuff: in 1951, a Jewish kid escapes his overbearing parents, heads off to a Catholic Midwestern college, loses his innocence with a shiksa goddess, and discovers himself. Yet, the film takes such a strange, nesting-narrative approach to getting into the story —opening with a woman staring at wallpaper in a contemporary nursing home, trailing back through a Korean war scene, then narrated by a character talking from beyond the grave— that you understand, early, that these tropes of genre will merely be the structure the narrative is hung on, not the be-all and end-all of its drama.

The film is an adaptation of a Philip Roth novel, and marks the directorial debut of long-time Ang Lee offsider James Schamus. It’s meticulously mounted: its compositions careful, the edges of the frame feeling like the walls of a prison; its acting top-shelf; its moments of confrontation turning in unexpected directions. The film truly comes to life in a pair of stand-offs between college student (Logan Lerman) and dean (Tracy Letts), where they parry and thrust, debating faith, rationalism, scholastic requirements, and student socialising; they essentially pivoting at the fulcrum of changing social, moral values.

Lerman plays the headstrong lead with a sense of dour, working-class teeth-gritting; Sarah Gadon the love-interest with the breathy intonation and wry smile of a screwball heroine. Their courtship is freewheeling for whitebread mid-century America, but, seen now, is awkward, stilted, stultified in convention. No sooner has it flickered to life than the passion must be snuffed. But, when Lerman’s visiting mother (Linda Emond, in a fabulous turn) does the obligatory ‘warning off’, she’s empathetic, thoughtful, reasonable, eloquent; full of hard-won wisdom and maternal ache. In a film whose early stretches suggest another study in parental nagging, it’s quite the turnaround; Indignation’s unlikely turns offering rich rewards for the patient and thoughtful.

HIGH-RISE

High-Rise’s shopping list for a party on the brink of an apocalypse: booze (obvz), canapés, cocktail onions, cake. But, after that apocalypse has come? Time to “eat the last of the dog”.

Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s titular text is hilarious, ridiculous, raucous, absurd, mad, messy. Wheatley has found a cult following by making taut, singular works like Kill List and A Field In England, but on High-Rise he pushes himself, and the envelope, and the audience. It’s a film that’ll likely piss off more people than it pleases –especially those drawn in by the light of Tom Hiddleston’s now-incandescent celebrity. It may end up being dubbed a grand cinematic failure, but there’s delight to be found in a work so enthusiastically, shamelessly over-the-top.

It’s an eerie dystopia set not in the not-too-distant-future, but in the year in which Ballard’s novel was published: 1975. In his posh-voiced narration, Hiddleston speaks of its characters as inhabiting “a future that had already taken place”, and, so, Wheatley stylises a retrofuturist fantasia in which the high-tech is all analogue, and the fashion —flared trousers, crocheted bags, shag carpet, patterned wallpaper, sexy stewardesses, macho toughs with sideburns and moustaches— luridly of the era.

Close to the entire tale takes place in the titular building, in which new modes of living are satirically depicted as the same-old social milieu made worse. In the ‘vertical village’ of the high-rise, the lower floors are for the lower classes, the upper floors for the upper classes. Social climbing means ascending a staircase. The building’s grand, greying, lordly architect, Jeremy Irons (whose name is, unsubtly, Royal), claims he conceived of it “as a crucible for change”, but instead it’s the status quo made immovable; English classism as structuralist prison.

By the end of the first act, High-Rise has begun its descent into the darkness, Wheatley hurtling into —and then holding onto— an extended orgy of decadence, debauchery, depravity. It’s a fabulous-looking portrait of mob mentality and collective madness, where tragedy is made pop-video, social commentary daft spectacle. The literalism of Ballard’s symbolism could, for others, be too much like a straitjacket, but Wheatley wears it rakishly, tossed over his shoulder. He delights in depicting its micro-society’s collapse into chaos, serving up a garish grotesquerie of outlandish images, rococo tableaux loaded with fucking, fighting, and dog-eating.

R.I.P.: MIFF 2016

Oh, hi there. Thanks for sticking around. You know, High-Rise, Indignation, and A Hologram For The King all just screened at the 65th Melbourne International Film Festival. By the time the festival closed last Sunday —its final session the Australian premiere of Alison Maclean’s charming, playful adaptation of Eleanor Catton’s The Rehearsal— your old pal Film Carew had seen 122 films from the program. 122! Now that it’s all over, in honour of the Death and Life of MIFF, here’s a eulogy in countdown form: Film Carew’s Sweet 16 Flicks o’ MIFF ’16:

16. Ma (USA, Celia Rowlson-Hall)

15. A Dragon Arrives! (Iran, Mani Haghighi)

14. Starless Dreams (Iran, Mehrdad Oskouei)

13. Fear Itself (UK, Charlie Lyne)

12. Kate Plays Christine (USA, Robert Greene)

11. Weiner (USA, Josh Kriegman & Elyse Steinberg)

10. Lo & Behold: Reveries Of The Connected World (USA, Werner Herzog)

9. Personal Shopper (France, Olivier Assayas)

8. Family Film (Czech Republic, Olmo Omerzu)

7. A Monster With A Thousand Heads (México, Rodrigo Plá)

6. The Demons (Canada, Philippe Lesage)

5. The Neon Demon (USA, Nicolas Winding Refn)