Buying and Selling the Good Fight in ‘War, Inc.’

“War, Inc.,” the presented-by-John-Cusack satire of Iraq War profiteering, is neither as bad nor as brave as advance press in various quarters has suggested. It’s essentially a riff on Mike Judge’s 2006 dystopian comedy “Idiocracy,” transposed to an anonymous Eurasian locale, with Mr. Cusack reprising his conflicted hangdog hit man from “Grosse Pointe Blank.” After hitting some early polemical points in a freewheeling blaze of mordant absurdity, the film putters through incongruously conventional romantic-comedy intrigue and self-defeating Borat-ism.Sometime in the not-too-distant future, the Tamerlaine corporation is handling America’s war-waging and nation-building for a standard Hollywood goats-and-stone-wall backwater nation called Turaqistan. Hauser (Mr. Cusack) has been hired to neutralize a local poobah obstructing an oil monopoly, but he gets distracted by a fetching, no-nonsense “Nation” muckraker named Natalie (Marisa Tomei) and a vapid regional pop starlet callled Yonica (Hilary Duff). Hauser’s cover is as producer of a trade show, run by a brassy rep who’s also an undercover agent (Joan Cusack).Like the moronic inferno of Mr. Judge’s far superior piece, Turaqistan is an ad-covered vision of privatization and pumped-up force run amok, with “Financial Times” banners on tanks and Central Command housed in a Popeye’s restaurant. Running the show is a shadowy corporate figure who appears only in morphing wallcasts, and who plans to jazz up the country’s launch with Yonica’s wedding to her track-suited thug of a boyfriend. Bombs go off with unremarked regularity.“War, Inc.” fizzes for a bit as a cynical black comedy, thanks in part to its co-screenwriter (with Mr. Cusack and Jeremy Pikser), Mark Leyner, the 1990s author who made his name converting the 500-cable-channel cliché into pop-culture-addled postmodern literature. Accordingly, the edgy zaniness of “War, Inc.” is hit-or-miss at best, and ultimately disposable. That’s even before Mr. Cusack’s hyperarticulate courtship-avoidance of his leading ladies leads the movie down almost amusingly familiar cul-de-sacs of hand-wringing.Dotting “War, Inc.,” like any mishmash of sharp and soft, are the odd, well-turned comic moment and stand-alone lampoon. Before Mr. Cusack (like the ramshackle plot) goes wobbly, the actor delivers his entertaining share of deadpan pessimism, while Ms. Tomei and Ms. Cusack have a short but sweet face-off. And the satire does take a risk with a trade-show kick line of Tamerlaine bombing victims rehabilitated with American prostheses, though the filmmakers take care to include two or three shots of conscience-afflicted Natalie reacting with shock and hurt. (Also duly noted are the resemblance of the Tamerlaine logo and that of Halliburton, and the homonymous echo with Christopher Marlowe’s play “Tamburlaine,” about hubristic conquest.)Among the weakest links are the Yonica character (for which Ms. Duff sports shaded makeup) and her slobbish entourage. These caricatures of vapid Westernization undermine the film’s shrill sympathies and expose unsure hands at work. Also distracting are Dan Aykroyd as a pointless Dick Cheney stand-in, and Ben Kingsley as Hauser’s former boss at the CIA; Mr. Kingsley’s carefully rolled Amerrrican accent is so incongruous as to sound dubbed. All of the above suggest bits that play as contained throwaways in print, but beach on screen.When all else fails, and it does, “War, Inc.” turns to stating its precepts. “War is the improvement of the investment climate by other means,” says a voice purportedly coming from Mr. Kingsley’s body. Provocative enough, but even if a common misconception states that satires need either to glad-hand or to be as surgical and virtuosic as “Dr. Strangelove,” this attempt (which apparently was kicking around before the fever dreams of Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales”) falls short and loses the nerve required to stay savvy and tight.

Buying and Selling the Good Fight in ‘War, Inc.’

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