War Dogs follows the story of David and Efron. Former high
school best friends who drifted apart, they get back together at a high school
friends funeral. After catching up, they become business partners in selling
guns to the war in Iraq.
While things start out smoothly enough, things get more complicated
when they land bigger contracts. The movie then follows them as they get more
involved as things keep going from bad to worse and they discover that the
world of arms dealing isn’t as safe as when they first started.
Predictably, some deals go wrong. David learns a valuable
life lesson about how exciting isn’t always good, and the friend everyone warns
him about ends up being a jerk. So this is a standard morale story that tries
to inject some Wolf of Wall Street into it.
At the end of the day, this is perhaps its biggest and most
unforgiving flaw. It follows the most boring character to tell the most generic
story. It takes no risks and wraps everything up with a “what lessons did we
learn here?” final tag in the closing scenes. And somehow everything kind-of
ends up okay for David.
This movie might have been more interesting if it followed
Efron and left an audience surrogate behind (or confined to voice-overs, like
Wolf). It is the equivalent of if Wolf of Wall Street followed one of
Leonardo’s junior employees. Doesn’t quite sound very interesting, does it.
At the end of the day, it was an interesting premise. It was
definitely better than the DC worst-of series this year. But it has to have a
hard pass for being too generic for its own good. If you want a pretty generic
story done extremely well, Kubo and the Two Strings is worth your time much,
much more.
1.5 out of 5 dog-eared waffles.
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