Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.0
Overall		4.0

War Dogs Blu-ray Movie Review

Cry Havoc!

Reviewed by Michael Reuben November 22, 2016

In 1983, Oscar-winning director William Friedkin attempted a satire of the global arms trade with Deal of the Century. Despite a superior cast and an intriguing script, the film floundered, in part because Friedkin struggled to find a consistent tone but also because he cast Chevy Chase as the story's protagonist, a small-timer trying to bluff his way into the upper echelons of a multi-billion dollar industry. Audiences weren't prepared to accept a performer best known for smirks and pratfalls in the role of a morally conflicted hustler.

Over three decades later, director Todd Phillips has taken another run at the same subject with better results. War Dogs was marketed as a comedy, probably on the strength of Phillips' reputation as the director of The Hangover trilogy (not to mention a career of silliness extending back through Old School and Road Trip), but the film's humor is the cynical variety that inspires knowing grins rather than belly laughs. In what turns out to be a surprisingly dark account of ambition gone wrong, Phillips proves adept at walking the fine line between mockery and cautionary tale. It helps that he's working from a (more or less) true story.

In 2005, two years into the war in Iraq, 25-year-old David Packouz (Miles Teller, Whiplash) reconnects with his best friend from high school, Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill), newly returned to Miami from a stint in California, where Efraim worked for his uncle selling guns. Now Efraim has started his own company, which he calls AEY, in which he invites David to join him as his partner. Efraim has discovered that there is a fortune to be made by identifying suitable contracts among the thousands posted by the Defense Department for public bidding. Efraim calls them "crumbs", because they're too small to attract the interest of major munitions companies, leaving an opening for a pair of creative entrepreneurs with nothing more than a telephone and a handful of contacts. David, who has been barely eking out a living as a massage therapist, is only too happy to join his former friend. His income promptly skyrockets, to the delight of his live-in and newly pregnant girlfriend, Iz (Ana de Armas), but David has to lie about the source of his new wealth, because Iz staunchly opposes the war.

As War Dogs charts the rise and fall of AEY, the obvious cinematic reference is Brian De Palma's Scarface, a poster of which is prominently displayed in the company offices and which the film repeatedly references. But an equally important antecedent is Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, from which War Dogs borrows multiple narrative elements and devices. Like Henry Hill, David narrates the film with the rueful tone of a sadder-but-wiser man. Like Henry, he begins as a wide-eyed outsider who is ushered into an illicit world that he finds welcoming and intoxicating, until it all goes wrong. And like Henry, David serves as our tour guide through a fascinating but hazardous underworld inhabited by a colorful rogue's gallery. Chief among them is an infamous international arms dealer named Henry Girard (Bradley Cooper), whose equal-opportunity dealings have landed him on the terrorist watch list, curtailing his ability to do business with the U.S. government. Girard offers David and Efraim what appears to be the chance of a lifetime involving a massive quantity of AK-47 ammunition purchased at a steep discount from the Republic of Albania. Like most things that look too good to be true, the deal turns out to have hidden strings, which entangle the youthful partners in increasingly hazardous machinations. Kevin Pollak appears in the small but pivotal role of Ralph Slutzsky, a Miami dry cleaner who helps bankroll David and Efraim's operation. (He thinks they're doing God's work by supplying arms to Israel.)

As David, Martin Teller conveys a convincing naiveté that humanizes War Dogs and elevates it above raw satire, as the well-intentioned schlub finds himself floundering in ever more dubious territory. He is well-matched by Jonah Hill's Efraim, who is the film's version of Goodfellas' Tommy DeVito, a charming sociopath capable of exploding in an instant if he's crossed (or if he wants to make a point). For Efraim, the excitement of the weapons trade is just as much an attraction as the opportunity to make money, and Hill gives him a disconcertingly off-key laugh that betrays the madness beneath the business suit. It's a wonder these two were ever best friends, and as so often happens when money is involved, friendship is the first casualty.

War Dogs Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

War Dogs was shot digitally (on the Arri Alexa RT Plus, according to IMDb) by Lawrence Sher, the cinematographer on Phillips' Hangover trilogy, who brings a similar photographic style to this film but also gets the opportunity to deploy different palettes in a wide variety of locales. The Miami scenes are brightly lit and dominated by cool blues and whites; scenes set in the Mideast reflect the yellow and gold of sun and sand; Albania (shot in Romania) has a grungy grayish-blue cast over everything; and Vegas is, of course, Vegas. Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray reflects the usual virtues of polished digital capture, with good (and often excellent) detail, sharp contrast and an absence of aliasing, artifacts or banding. The average bitrate of 29.37 Mbps continues a welcome trend from Warner's theatrical group toward the more generous compression that is routine on discs from its corporate cousin, the Warner Archive Collection.

War Dogs Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

For a film about the arms trade, War Dogs' lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundtrack is surprisingly light on high-octane sound effects. A semi-comical sequence in Fallujah briefly pits the U.S. military's heavy artillery against insurgents, but otherwise the film's gunfire is limited to target practice and weapons tests (and, in one instance, an ill-considered display of force against a group of Miami weed dealers). But while the effects aren't especially loud, the sound editing is first-rate, supplying immersive sonic signatures for the film's various environments, from the sedate Miami offices, apartments and diners where the AEY partners ply their trade to the rougher locales in the Mideast and Albania, where the heavy lifting occurs. Dialogue is clearly rendered and properly prioritized, with David's narration lifted above the action.

The incidental music is by Cliff Martinez, who has scored numerous films for Steven Soderbergh and Nicolas Winding Refn, but the film's most memorable musical interludes are derived from an eclectic playlist drawn from multiple time periods. Phillips has been quoted as saying that "[t]he right music can sometimes do five pages of scripted dialogue", and War Dogs makes effective use of songs from Blue Oyster Cult ("Don't Fear the Reaper"), The Who ("Behind Blue Eyes"), Vanilla Fudge ("You Keep Me Hangin' On"), Dean Martin ("Ain't That a Kick in the Head") and many more. Even the elevator music has been carefully chosen. During a critical scene, the generic muzak gradually breaks through the conversation to reveal an instrumental version of Jim Croce's "Time in a Bottle", which, in the context of the scene, is either a wistful comment or a sick joke (probably both).

War Dogs Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The slim extras are mostly promotional, except for "Pentagon Pie", which is just plain weird.

• General Phillips: Boots on the Ground (1080p; 2.40:1; 8:38): This is essentially an EPK, with the focus on director Phillips. Teller, Hill and Cooper are among the interviewees.



• Access Granted (1080p; 2.40:1; 10:08): An abbreviated look at War Dogs's source material, including interviews with the real David Packouz (who has a small part in the film) and reporter Guy Lawson, whose Rolling Stone article inspired the script.



• Pentagon Pie (1080p; 1.78:1; 2:49): An animated gloss on the story of War Dogs, with singing rats taking the place of David and Efraim.



• Trailers: The film's trailer is not included. At startup, the disc plays a trailer for The Accountant, plus the now-familiar Warner promo for 4K discs.

War Dogs Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There's plenty of political subtext in War Dogs, if one wants to look for it, but it's equally enjoyable as a (sorta) true shaggy dog story about misguided initiative—Horatio Alger meets P.T. Barnum by way of Guns & Ammo. Warner's Blu-ray is light on extras but technically superior. Recommended.