War, Inc. Packs Crowds and Snowballs with Sharp Bits of True Lies

After a total lack of effect from multiple shots of Red Bull a full week into the Tribeca Festival, and in dire need of a yoga mat after squeezing my knees down into theater seats apparently meant for pygmy first graders, I rolled into War, Inc. today guided with one glowing notion. Joan Cusack would save me from my morose state after one too many gut-jangling documentaries. It's always good to program one or two films like that for last. The sure things.

As for Cusack, this woman is one of the funniest human beings on the planet. How people miss her, I don't know.

Oh, and then there's her brother. Some guy.

(Who knows.)

The film suffers a rumbled path for a few intermittent scenes due to unclear dialog, but then again this sly comedy doesn't mind a few half-hidden explosive remarks. In another theater that's not cranked up to 11 a lot of those remarks would come through much more clearly, but that's the trade-off for doing a political satire set in a war zone.

Even with the minor technical wobble with the sound, someone did get smart enough to throw in some subtitles so we'd get the fantastic Casablanca send up from the scenes with Lyubomir Neikov. The plot moves in strange directions that grants it a realness even while professional comedians pop off deadpan remarks like weapons specialists. The lines are all whip smart and laser targeted way deep in parody-land.

Be prepared. Veteran comedians, and I mean good ones, are just crawling out of the woodwork to get a piece of this film. All for good reason. It's a coven of them by the end. Things burn. We laugh too much. The ploy gets messy and complicated and satisfying. Then when they could have left it there, the thing just leaps completely off the rails, confident like a bumble bee that it can fly just because it thinks it can, aerodynamics be damned. Typical, and yet somehow acceptable behavior from this troop.

Ben Kingsley, known for his serious side lately, does a great job channeling Hannibal Lector as George C. Scott from Dr. Strangelove. John Cusack is suddenly hot or maybe I'm just not twelve watching his films anymore and he's finally playing a role where he drops a pair. He had to have some consolation for not being Joan, I guess. As writer and leading man, he works out being a middle-age John Bender from The Breakfast Club while sorting which bottle of Tabasco to down and accidentally-on-purpose sabotaging his chances to assassinate his target political official.

Hilary Duff is a great actress here as well as a capable collaborator. Usually when you hear there will be the token siren, it's meant as a warning of comparative brain damage when they're stood up against real actors. But to her credit Duff more than stands her own ground while having abs to die for in all of her scenes. She proves beyond whatever candy coating she's had applied to her in the past that she's going to stick. That's a small miracle in Hollywood formula all to itself.

Marisa Tomei nails her scenes and also entertaining portions of John Cusack hiding out in a Hummer, and while this isn't a romance it is one of the strongest politically motivated pieces of shrapnel to fly out of the film industry since Borat trooped in from Kazakhstan.

The whole thing pummels the unspoken truths about politics and war as a rare bit of film that's neither pretentious nor cliché. The characters are all freaked out respectively, and who wouldn't be? That's the magic of a good satire in that it keeps a perfect sense of real characters living in an unbelievably disjointed unreality.

The ending is pure John Hughes paint job, but forgivable for its less touching final moment of a usual Hughes film if only because it left such a core dump of endorphins throughout the mid half of the plot. After an incredibly fun ride, the story makes an unsteady landing back on the ground as a true war satire. But then how does one end a war satire? They don't end gladly. Even so this one manages to kick up the impact and the comedy to a high enough point that the truth can hurt a little bit. In fact, this may be the smartest, strangest war satire comedy since Kubrick cast James Earl Jones as a late-stage nuclear arms objector.

Worth a visit when it hits theaters on May 23.