Um, boss, I’m pretty sure the Afghan Ambassador here is from Afghanistan.

War Machine

(2017)

(SPOILERS) How many War on Terror movies have to be made – let alone War on Terror satires – before Hollywood realises it simply doesn’t have what it takes to interrogate the ongoing charade with any degree of acumen, diligence or (in this case) wit. This isn’t just true of that particular ongoing excursion into imperialism, of course, it’s largely the case with any would-be politically-attuned vehicles (see the recent Our Brand Is Crisis), that go for soft ineffectuality, or knowing aloofness, when something, anything would be preferable. Anger’s one mode. Insight’s even better. They’re both absent from War Machine, a fictionalised account the attempts by General Stanley McChrystal (here as Brad Pitt’s Glen McMahon) to preside over a turnaround in the US armed forces fortunes in Afghanistan despite the realisation he’s been sent in to oversee a withdrawal. The result is unfocussed and rambling, unsure who its targets are or even if it holds a position. Other than being above it all.

Pitt’s cartoonish performance, all exaggerated posturing and delivery, has come in for a lot of stick, but that’s only fair in as much as he’s acting in a different, more interesting movie than the one David Michôd is making (which Michôd also wrote, based on Michael Hastings’ The Operators). Pitt’s movie, as bold, brazen and as uncompromisingly unsubtle as its main character, might have fired salvos at all comers, sharing out versions of the same dumb rhetoric McMahon spouts to parties concerned while reserving particular ire for the whys and wherefores of the conflict itself, which go unmentioned (other than some vague headshaking).

As it is, we’re presented with McMahon as a “master of systems organisations” who refuses to accept that he hasn’t been sent to Afghanistan to win, who chides “Seems to me everyone’s forgetting we’re fighting a war here” and has designs on bringing the most difficult region to heel as a signal of his greater intent. Faced with POTUS’ refusal to provide extra troops and delays on everything he intends to institute (told he will have to wait while local elections are re-held owing to corruption, he dismisses such concerns with “How is Washington any different?”), he goes on 60 Minutes and creates a political embarrassment for Obama. There’s a certain Catch-22 logic operating here that Pitt probably thought he could tap (and since he’d had previous success working with Antipodean Andrew Dominik, he probably thought Michôd’s outsider view would be equally incisive), but the picture only rarely approaches such areas in an engaged or astute manner.

President Karzai: And what is this new direction?

McMahon: It is most important to me that we build Afghanistan. Together we build Afghanistan into a free and prosperous nation. Free from fear and conflict.

President Karzai: I see, I see. It sounds a lot like the old direction.

His audience with Ben Kingsley’s West-sanctioned President Karzai, in which he preaches the new direction for the country, has the right air of flippancy towards what the military think they’re doing, but a whole spiel on counter insurgency is subsequently delivered as a dry voiceover monologue from Scoot McNairy’s (Rolling Stone) journalist Sean Cullen; “The thing about counterinsurgency is that it doesn’t really work”. He posits that McMahon’s response to this would be “Cos nobody’s ever done it right”.

This is fertile ground, that insurgents are near impossible to defeat, but countermoves are equally ineffective, requiring you to convince the population you’re there here to help, making you part of a popularity contest, along the way installing a local government, providing security, training up the local forces so they can provide security to help themselves (or at least try to) and stimulating the local economy, but it’s too impassive to have any edge or impact. There’s a scene where McMahon asks why growers are producing heroin crops, and he is told they can’t produce cotton because it would be in competition with US product. Michôd gets close to the resource plundering that is the key to Afghanistan, but then loses his nerve and retreats to the safer ground of surface, easily mockable military farce.

Hence, McMahon is rebuked with “All the winning we were ever going to do, we did in the first six months. Since then, we’ve just been making a mess. You’re not here to win. You’re here to clean up the mess”. The idea that Afghanistan is simply a disaster is a convenient narrative hiding ulterior goals, though; make the entire operation look like a botch, and it becomes more palatable. Simply a mistake. Whether Pitt is aware he has served such an agenda is debatable; probably not, but then few will likely care either way. I doubt many with the opportunity to sit through a “free” Brad Pitt movie on Netflix are going to last the distance; By the Sea has more attitude.

At one point, Tilda Swinton cameos as a German politician spelling out what we’ve already had spelled out several times already by our narrator and in various conversations; it’s overkill. The incessant narration is a fairly substantial signpost that something is seriously wrong. I love a good voiceover, but this one is entirely guiding the plot as a substitute for storytelling. When we need to be told who the central character is over the course of five, there’s something askew. The flipside is that a similar approach actually worked for The Big Short (from the same producers). Of course, there they knew what their goal was.

Part of the problem is that Michôd isn’t a satirist, certainly on this evidence, and it’s telling that the one scene that lands feels like it has strayed in from a different movie. Which is also a different movie to the different movie Pitt thinks he’s in. Maybe Michôd simply felt it wouldn’t be a War on Terror picture without a scene of conflict. Maybe he thought a scene of actual combat would provide something sobering, akin to Yossarian’s traumatic memory in Catch-22. So the scene in which Lakeith Stanfield’s corporal, taking matters into his own hands when his squad comes under fire, discovers his mortar bomb has been responsible for killing a child is strong stuff, but tonally out of place. More on target is McMahon appearing on the scene and blathering on to the grieving father about helping to rebuild; Stanfield’s earlier quizzing of the bewildered general about his nonsense rhetoric is also well done, albeit in both cases we shouldn’t need to be walked by the hand with this sort of thing. It reflects the essential lack of faith in the audience throughout.

There are some very good performances in War Machine. Anthony Michael Hall’s a particular standout as McMahon’s devoted, hot-headed right-hand man Major General Pulver (loosely based on Mike Flynn). Nicholas Jones, Alan Ruck and Griffin Dunne are strong as obstructive bureaucrats, and Meg Tilly is excellent as McMahon’s church mouse wife. And the Russell Crowe cameo (as, essentially, David Petraeus) as the next guy up to replace McMahon, is an amusing send-off. But they’re a good cast mostly wasted.

Cullen concludes by asking why the media didn’t ask bigger questions regarding McMahon’s removal, but damningly, you could say exactly the same of the movie. What’s the surprise here? That the US military’s methods are incompetent? That’s not news, and it isn’t terribly rousingly interesting the way Michôd has told it. Perhaps Hollywood would be better off sticking with straightforward firefights (American Sniper, 13 Hours, the forthcoming Bruckheimer-produced Horse Soldiers), rather than making a pretence of critiques.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

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You guys sure like watermelon.

The Irishman aka I Heard You Paint Houses (2019)
(SPOILERS) Perhaps, if Martin Scorsese hadn’t been so opposed to the idea of Marvel movies constituting cinema, The Irishman would have been a better film. It’s a decent film, assuredly. A respectable film, definitely. But it’s very far from being classic. And a significant part of that is down to the usually assured director fumbling the execution. Or rather, the realisation. I don’t know what kind of crazy pills the ranks of revered critics have been taking so as to recite as one the mantra that you quickly get used to the de-aging effects so intrinsic to its telling – as Empire magazine put it, “you soon… fuggadaboutit” – but you don’t. There was no point during The Irishman that I was other than entirely, regrettably conscious that a 75-year-old man was playing the title character. Except when he was playing a 75-year-old man.

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Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.

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Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

You're skipping Christmas! Isn't that against the law?

Christmas with the Kranks (2004)
Ex-coke dealer Tim Allen’s underwhelming box office career is, like Vince Vaughn’s, regularly in need of a boost from an indiscriminate public willing to see any old turkey posing as a prize Christmas comedy. He made three Santa Clauses, and here is joined by Jamie Lee Curtis as a couple planning to forgo the usual neighbourhood festivities for a cruise.

So you want me to be half-monk, half-hitman.

Casino Royale (2006)
(SPOILERS) Despite the doubts and trepidation from devotees (too blonde, uncouth etc.) that greeted Daniel Craig’s casting as Bond, and the highly cynical and low-inspiration route taken by Eon in looking to Jason Bourne's example to reboot a series that had reached a nadir with Die Another Day, Casino Royale ends up getting an enormous amount right. If anything, its failure is that it doesn’t push far enough, so successful is it in disarming itself of the overblown set pieces and perfunctory plotting that characterise the series (even at its best), elements that would resurge with unabated gusto in subsequent Craig excursions.

For the majority of its first two hours, Casino Royale is top-flight entertainment, with returning director Martin Campbell managing to exceed his excellent work reformatting Bond for the ‘90s. That the weakest sequence (still good, mind) prior to the finale is a traditional “big” (but not too big) action set piece involving an attempt to…

The guy practically lives in a Clue board.

Knives Out (2019)
(SPOILERS) “If Agatha Christie were writing today, she’d have a character who’s an Internet troll.” There’s a slew of ifs and buts in that assertion, but it tells you a lot about where Rian Johnson is coming from with Knives Out. As in, Christie might – I mean, who can really say? – but it’s fair to suggest she wouldn’t be angling her material the way Johnson does, who for all his pronouncement that “This isn’t a message movie” is very clearly making one. He probably warrants a hesitant pass on that statement, though, to the extent that Knives Out’s commentary doesn’t ultimately overpower the whodunnit side of the plot. On the other hand, when Daniel Craig’s eccentrically accented sleuth Benoit Blanc is asked “You’re not much of a detective, are you?” the only fair response is vigorous agreement.

It's their place, Mac. They have a right to make of it what they can. Besides, you can't eat scenery!

Local Hero (1983)
(SPOILERS) With the space of thirty-five years, Bill Forsyth’s gentle eco-parable feels more seductive than ever. Whimsical is a word often applied to Local Hero, but one shouldn’t mistake that description for its being soft in the head, excessively sentimental or nostalgic. Tonally, in terms of painting a Scottish idyll where the locals are no slouches in the face of more cultured foreigners, the film hearkens to both Powell and Pressburger (I Know Where I’m Going!) and Ealing (Whisky Galore!), but it is very much its own beast.

I’m the famous comedian, Arnold Braunschweiger.

Last Action Hero (1993)
(SPOILERS) Make no mistake, Last Action Hero is a mess. But even as a mess, it might be more interesting than any other movie Arnie made during that decade, perhaps even in his entire career. Hellzapoppin’ (after the 1941 picture, itself based on a Broadway revue) has virtually become an adjective to describe films that comment upon their own artifice, break the fourth wall, and generally disrespect the convention of suspending disbelief in the fictions we see parading across the screen. It was fairly audacious, some would say foolish, of Arnie to attempt something of that nature at this point in his career, which was at its peak, rather than playing it safe. That he stumbled profoundly, emphatically so since he went up against the behemoth that is Jurassic Park (slotted in after the fact to open first), should not blind one to the considerable merits of his ultimate, and final, really, attempt to experiment with the limits of his screen persona.

Of course, one m…

I'm reliable, I'm a very good listener, and I'm extremely funny.

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)
(SPOILERS) When I wrote my 23 to see in 2019, I speculated that James Cameron might be purposefully giving his hand-me-downs to lesser talents because he hubristically didn’t want anyone making a movie that was within a spit of the proficiency we’ve come to expect from him. Certainly, Robert Rodriguez and Tim Miller are leagues beneath Kathryn Bigelow, Jimbo’s former spouse and director of his Strange Days screenplay. Miller’s no slouch when it comes to action – which is what these movies are all about, let’s face it – but neither is he a craftsman, so all those reviews attesting that Terminator: Dark Fate is the best in the franchise since Terminator 2: Judgment Day may be right, but there’s a considerable gulf between the first sequel (which I’m not that big a fan of) and this retcon sequel to that sequel.

He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982)
(SPOILERS) I don’t love Star Trek, but I do love Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That probably isn’t just me, but a common refrain of many a non-devotee of the series. Although, it used to apply to The Voyage Home (the funny one, with the whales, the Star Trek even the target audience for Three Men and a Baby could enjoy). Unfortunately, its high regard has also become the desperate, self-destructive, song-and-verse, be-all-and-end-all of the overlords of the franchise itself, in whichever iteration, it seems. This is understandable to an extent, as Khan is that rare movie sequel made to transcendent effect on almost every level, and one that stands the test of time every bit as well (better, even) as when it was first unveiled.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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