Simply put, America does not much like itself right now. There are myriad domestic and economic issues at play in this anger, anxiety and depression, of course, but almost every interpretation begins with a look overseas, at the $12 billion a month being spent in Iraq, and the outlay for long-term military involvement in that country, and Afghanistan, that will cost the United States $1.7 to $2.7 trillion by 2017.

The long, seemingly endless slog of the war in Iraq, as well as re-litigation over the reasons for its launch, and a prosecution by the Bush administration beset with moral scandals (e.g., Abu Ghraib), corruption and waste (just a few days ago, CBS News revealed that $8 $8 billion was paid to multinational contractors with little or no oversight, in some cases lacking even basic invoices explaining how the money was spent), have taken their collective toll. If, as recent polling suggests, more than 80 percent of the country thinks we’re headed in the wrong direction, it’s safe to assume that number is even a bit higher in the left-leaning Hollywood creative community.



All of which brings us to John Cusack’s War, Inc., a lumpy political satire being loosely, if misguidedly, pitched as in the same general vein as Grosse Pointe Blank. The latest in a string of movies — a list that includes Brian DePalma’s controversial Redacted, Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs, Gavin Hood’s Rendition and Kimberly Peirce’s Stop-Loss — to put America’s war policies under the microscope for analysis, the film is set in the fictional country of Turaqistan, a nation occupied by an American private corporation run by the recently retired vice president.

The filmic equivalent of a bleating, hot microphone — all crossed wires and misfunneled energy — War, Inc. apparently came together via the draft. Co-screenwriter Cusack, a fan of absurdist author Mark Leyner, pulled him into the project, wanting to write about the privatization of war. Also a fan of 1998’s Bulworth, Cusack rang its writer, Jeremy Pikser, and asked him to join the tea party. The strange seams of this unusual collaboration show, with supporting characters (including a sexy, hard-charging liberal reporter played by Marisa Tomei and an outrageous Middle Eastern pop star played by Hilary Duff) jammed in at unusual angles and certain situations seeming to have no realistic bearing on others.

While beset with different problems, the aforementioned films, all commercial busts, were arguably each in some small way, to degrees, felled by their inability to reconcile their makers’ personal anger or irritation with the current administration’s political choices with basic tenets of good drama. Similarly, though more wryly than stridently, War, Inc., too, summons to mind Benjamin Franklin’s quotation that “whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.” It’s a satire, and clearly aims for interlocution just by flinging out different concepts and riffing on them (journalists “feel” the war by partaking of a battle simulator ride, apolitical local wedding videographers compensate for a drop in business with porn and insurgent be-headings), but War, Inc. doesn’t even have the tasty advantage of flinty, anger-fueled wit. Its exasperation and resentment with the current political clime has merely hardened, like oatmeal left out overnight, into something sludgy and almost unrecognizable. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here. (First Look, R, 106 minutes)