John Cusack has been doing a lot of press to promote War, Inc., a satire about the modern Halliburton era of corporatized warfare. That’s understandable—he has an unusual stake in the movie’s success, seeing as how he co-wrote (along with Bulworth screenwriter Jeremy Pikser and novelist Mark Leyner), co-produced, co-financed, and stars in it as professional killer-for-hire Brand Hauser. The dead-eyed Hauser is sleepwalking through life, dulling the painful memories of the people he’s murdered by downing shotglass after shotglass of the most lethal hot sauce brands he can find. But in his interviews, Cusack burns with justifiable anger over the way the United States has cynically allowed large regions of the globe to become playgrounds for greedy corporations. Here he is, for instance, talking about the film’s supposedly “offensive” humour in a web-only interview with Vanity Fair:“I think the idea was to make [the film] offensive,” he says. “I think what’s happening is offensive. The types of vertical integration that are going on are obscene: these companies that are making money off the bombing of a place and the reconstruction.... Rumsfeld was hosting a ski tournament for soldiers who had lost a limb and he was also sitting on the board of a company that was making the prosthetic limbs. There’s nothing we could do in the movie that has a fraction of the real obscenities of the war profiteers and the mercenaries and these so-called free marketeers who basically set up a fast protectionist’s racket.”
And even though everything Cusack says makes sense, that still doesn’t alter the fact that the scene from War, Inc. that he’s talking about—in which we see a chorus line of female amputees on artificial legs rehearsing a Rockettes-style number for an upcoming pro-American TV extravaganza—isn’t funny in the slightest. Maybe some sick humour could be squozen from this concept—perhaps as a sight gag glimpsed, Airplane!-style, in the background of a dialogue scene— but director Joshua Seftel’s camera sits on the image so leadenly, and for such a protracted length of time, that he squanders whatever comic shock value it might have otherwise had.
Cusack says one of War, Inc.’s inspirations was Dr. Strangelove, and like Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War masterpiece, it’s populated by a gallery of very broadly drawn supporting characters. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—satire is often all about comic exaggeration—but Seftel unerringly finds a way to make all of them as strident and unpleasant as possible. Hilary Duff plays Yonica Babyyeah, a Central Asian pop-singing nymphet so sulky and spoiled that she makes Hilary Duff seem like a regular down-to-earth teenager by comparison. Ben Kingsley is allowed to use a ridiculous American accent as Walken, Hauser’s former boss. Dan Aykroyd’s amusing cameo as the Cheney-esque head of the Halliburton-esque Tamerlane corporation is undermined by the decision to have him perform most of his scenes on the toilet. But worst of all is the ordinarily delightful Joan Cusack—John’s sister and frequent co-star—whose performance as Hauser’s Tamerlane liaison is a succession of shrieks and screeches, many of them delivered right into Seftel’s fisheye lens.
John Cusack’s instinct to provide viewers some relief from all the hamminess surrounding him by underplaying his role is probably correct, but in practice, he comes across alternately as smug, sour, or just plain bored—rousing himself only for a couple of action scenes in which Hauser disarms half a dozen bad guys with his bare hands. But the thick-bodied Cusack is never remotely convincing as a kung fu killing machine (the brief glimpse Seftel gives us of Steven Seagal on a TV screen is unintentionally apt), and the decision to give Hauser a tragic backstory (murdered wife, missing child) is a sentimental miscalculation for a satire conceived, as Cusack likes to proclaim to interviewers, in the take-no-prisoners punk-rock spirit of bands like The Clash.
For someone so fired up with righteous indignation, Cusack looks morose and miserable in almost every scene of this film. As a result, War, Inc. becomes a curious artifact: it’s a vanity project whose star doesn’t seem to even want to be in it.
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