War Dogs (15)

War Dogs (15)

Directed by Todd Phillips
Picturehouse, Liverpool
From 26th August 2016

Reviewed by Colin Serjent

This is at times a ham-fisted comedy but the film does make some valid points about the staggering amount of money America spent during the Iraq War. The figure ran to nearly $2 trillion ($2 million million), with that sum likely to rise to $6 trillion over the next thirty years with money spent on benefits to war veterans.

Director Todd Phillips puts forward the view that without the country’s Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), including the arms industry, the American economy would be in serious danger of collapse. In other words the USA needs to repeatedly go to war to maintain the stability of the MIC, with the latest example the indiscriminate bombings of civilians in Syria.

The corruption inherent in the Pentagon is overtly put forward throughout the movie. Often arms of varying types are supplied to the Pentagon and its associates by often shady arms dealers, as typified by the two main characters in War Dogs, Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill) and David Packouz (Miles Teller), without any proper scrutiny as to who are delivering these weapons, etc.

The film is based loosely on a true story, which describes the scamming of the American federal government and its client states.

Diveroli and Packouz trawl lists of available Pentagon arms contracts on the Internet and pick up small deals that big companies overlook.

In one scene they personally deliver a shipment of arms to Baghdad and are paid in cash! One of the American soldiers who dealt with their payment told them that they have a warehouse full of American dollars, up to a billion in value. This might seem highly unlikely but it was probably true.

As referred to before the most disturbing thing about War Dogs is that the seemingly ludicrous narrative is true.

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