War Dogs 

Partially inspired by the real-life case of Efraim Diveroli (played by Jonah Hill) and David Packouz (played by Miles Teller), War Dogs tells the story of two kids who were best friends in high school and reunite to build a shady company selling weapons of questionable origin to the United States government. The story is told from the perspective of the naive Packouz, who throws his lot in with Diveroli in hopes of becoming a good provider for his family, but gets in over his head almost immediately.

The film portrays Diveroli as a grotesque sociopath, and Jonah Hill has fun with the role, which doesn’t necessarily mean the audience does: watching a person behave as obnoxiously as possible gets old pretty quickly. In contrast, Miles Teller’s Packouz is simply boring, a “babe in the woods” character whose relationship is strained by the secrecy and lies surrounding his work.

The movie is at its best when it focuses on the parts of the story that are in fact based on the real world case: the open contracting process for arms sales, the growth of the Diveroli/Packouz business into a company that manages to land one of the biggest Pentagon contracts, the process of acquiring and re-selling arms of dubious provenance.

The arms business is one of the dirtiest in the world, and it deserves fiction and documentaries that uncover the link between the war profiteers and the untold harm their work inflicts on people they will never meet. In contrast, War Dogs is merely the story of a couple of hustlers whose actions are portrayed largely divorced from any real world consequences. The story unfolds fairly predictably and leaves us with little payoff.

Still, thanks to reasonable performances by Teller and Hill, and a fine cameo by Bradley Cooper, War Dogs is by no means a terrible movie – a reasonable choice for a boring evening or a long flight.