Jonah Hill graduates from student to teacher in entertaining 'War Dogs'
Toward the end of the 2013 comedy This Is the End, Jonah Hill's character "Jonah Hill" says, while possessed by a demon, "Jonah Hill is no more."
And so it is with Hill's latest performance, in Todd Phillips' sleazy cautionary tale War Dogs, based on the so-crazy-it-must-be-true story of international arms dealers Efraim Diveroli (Hill) and David Packouz (Miles Teller).
Let's get this out of the way up top: This is not "a dramatic performance" from comic actor Jonah Hill. It's a performance, period.
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Though he still provides some laughs -- including from his actual laugh -- Hill has already proven his dramatic chops. War Dogs is some new transition away from comedy.
Hill is no longer the funny, fat kid you probably remember from a handful of Judd Apatow productions before he went "legit" with Moneyball and The Wolf of Wall Street. He's now the two-time Oscar nominee who simply came up in comedy before hitting his stride working alongside Oscar winners such as Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese, Brad Pitt and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
And now, in War Dogs, Hill is playing a demon in human form, a genuinely nasty piece of work who wields his irrevocably broken moral compass like a weapon. Hill's go-for-broke performance is worth the price of admission, but what's even more impressive is how the role casts him in a new light as he graduates from student to teacher.
In Moneyball, Pitt's baseball GM Billy Beane takes Hill's Peter Brand under his wing, mentoring him in front-office matters. In The Wolf of Wall Street, DiCaprio's shady stock broker Jordan Belfort does the same with Hill's wide-eyed Donnie Azoff, who wants to be just like his boss.
War Dogs casts Hill in yet another secondary lead as Efraim, as the story is told from David's point of view. But this time around, Hill is the one showing someone else the ropes.
The role reversal is key. Teller may get more screen time, but Hill owns the movie, armed with the unforgettable laugh of a cracked-out banshee and a scary inability to tell the truth. He'll be whoever he has to be in order to get what he wants. It's this whatever-it-takes attitude that David admires in Efraim. He looks up to him, explaining that "when life kicked me, I stayed down. But Efraim? He kicked back."
Efraim and David's bizarre story was first chronicled by journalist Guy Lawson, whose Rolling Stone article serves as the film's basis. Back in 2005, David was a struggling massage therapist with a baby on the way when he was reunited with Efraim, who had been doing well living off the crumbs of Pentagon defense contracts.
After just a few weeks of working together, the guys are driving matching Porsches and moving into apartments in the same ritzy building -- David with pregnant girlfriend Iz (Ana de Armas, looking like a Cuban Kelly Kapowski) in tow.
They do business with people around the world with whom the U.S. government can’t be seen doing business -- the sort that takes them to faraway lands, be it Iraq, to smuggle ammunition through "the triangle of death," or Albania, to do a half-assed inspection of 100 million bullets that are key to their biggest score.
Like Moneyball and The Big Short, War Dogs is jam-packed with numbers and information. Did you know that it costs roughly $17,500 to outfit just one U.S. soldier between guns, ammo, bulletproof vests, helmets, gas masks, night vision goggles, boots, etc.? Or that U.S. taxpayers spend $4.5 billion each year air conditioning American troops? These stats are interesting even if they don't add up to much, and they blow by thanks to the movie's fast clip.
That's to Phillips' credit, considering the pay-attention! geopolitics at play. There's brief discussions of George W. Bush leveling the playing field and the Pentagon arming the Afghans to build an army, but for the most part, the film isn’t concerned with the politics of war. It's far more interested in money. And eventually crumbs aren't enough for the all-consuming appetite of Efraim.
And now that we're back to Hill, it must be said that you can't take your eyes off him. He's like the modern day Joe Pesci -- he makes the choice to go big with Efraim, who's written as an arms dealer caricature. (You can't miss the machine gun in his trunk and homages to Scarface all over his office.)
But Hill brings out a complexity to the character, no small feat given how slippery Efraim is. He's a tricky one to pin down. One minute he's pained to discover he wasn't invited to a dinner party at David's apartment, the next he's embracing the obnoxious American stereotype by hurling racial insults at his Pakistani smuggling partner (Shaun Toub), calling him “Aladdin” and an “Iraqi Tom Selleck" shortly after instructing an 11-year-old translator to speak “gibberish."
Hill's co-stars do their best to keep up, but their characters just aren't as interesting. Teller continues to prove himself as a leading man, making us feel David's isolation in Albania and growing frustration with his supposed BFF, but he's overshadowed by Hill's larger-than-life presence onscreen. De Armas is radiant as David’s baby momma, but her character is written too thin, and every time she threatens to become more interesting, Phillips hustles her out of the scene.
Despite a few flaws, War Dogs is Phillips' most mature work, and it echoes the strides that Adam McKay and Michael Bay have made in recent years with The Big Short and Pain and Gain. War Dogs seems like the love child of those films -- though it's preferable to both.
