IT’S time to ask: Has any war, ever, inspired such a heavy proportion of truly dreadful fictional movies as the current conflict in Iraq? I mean, even the Civil War had “Gone With the Wind.”
I love John Cusack – you can find my blurb on the back of the DVD of his war-themed flop from last year, “Grace Is Gone” – but even as a card-carrying liberal I can’t imagine what he was thinking as the star, producer and co-writer of the mind-bogglingly awful satire “War, Inc.”
Directed with sledgehammer subtlety by Joshua Seftel, this virtually unwatchable mess takes place mostly in a Middle Eastern country occupied by a Halliburton-like corporation headed by a former vice president (Dan Aykroyd) who resembles Dick Cheney and even delivers one speech from his toilet.
Cusack plays a Tabasco-swilling hit man with a past, hired to assassinate an oil minister named Omar Sharif (played by that actor) who wants to build his own pipeline.
To accomplish that mission, he poses as an exhibitor at a trade show that features a chorus line of amputees with high-tech prosthetic limbs. Serving as a major distraction is a liberal reporter for The Nation (Marisa Tomei!) with whom Cusack’s character develops a love-hate relationship. There’s also a Central European pop tart named Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff), who drops a scorpion down her pants and whose wedding is the centerpiece of the trade show.
And I haven’t mentioned Ben Kingsley, sporting another one of his eccentric American accents, as a Big Brother-like character from Cusack’s past.
The intention seems to have been a modern-day version of “Dr. Strangelove,” but Cusack’s woeful film makes “Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay” look positively Kubrickian by comparison.
What emerges from the chaos is a chokingly angry, incoherent attack on the present administration that’s even harder to sit through than such similar Iraq-themed misfires as “American Dreamz” and “Southland Tales.”
The movie has two modes – very loud and extremely loud – and all of the actors are encouraged to mug their hearts out. That even includes Cusack’s real-life sister Joan, normally one of the most reliable performers in the business.
Playwright George S. Kaufman once famously said, “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.” If he had been around to witness “War, Inc.,” he might have updated that to observe that satire is what gets a token theatrical release, followed by interment on DVD a month later.