WAR (Machine)...HOO! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR??

American pop culture is at an interesting...impasse, I guess you could say, in terms of how it treats the Iraq war. For a good long while during the Iraq war conflict, American war movies were firmly situated in the past, namely in World War II where audiences could have a greater sense of removal from what was transpiring on-screen and some clear-cut villains (Nazi's and Hitler) to root against. In 2009, we got two movies that tackled the brutality offered up by the war and its effects on individual men with the excellent The Hurt Locker and the incredible Brothers, but since then, most of our wartime movies have been mostly empty features, whether they're just "rah-rah" action films like Lone Survivor or American Sniper or supposedly philosophical but mostly just empty movies like Billy Lynn's Long Half-Time Walk.

The big problem, in my opinion, is that nobody's really bringing a more intimate view towards the war that can be used as a springboard for larger ideas regarding the nature of this exact conflict like The Hurt Locker and Brothers did. Most recent American films dealing with this particular conflict just do a surface-level "War is awesome!" or "War is hell!" take on the Iraq war without going into greater detail on its ideas on the elongated battle nor create interesting characters we're dramatically invested in to navigate the Iraq War. In contrast to many other movies covering the Iraq War, the new Netflix movie from director David Michod War Machine attempts to go a slightly satirical route, one that seems to be channeling a little bit of Dr. Strangelove and a lot of the 2015 Brad Pitt produced movie The Big Short, though with nowhere near the same success rate as those two excellent features.

Meet General Glen McMahon (Brad Pitt), an experienced general with a heavy Southern accent and a can-do attitude by his side. He's been deployed to help handle the American military situation in Afghanistan which is not going so well. The U.S. forces have basically invaded the territory and then turned right around to try to tell the inhabitants of this land that they're here to help and improve their lives. This, for some reason, does not sit well with the various Afghanistan residents and it's up to McMahon to navigate that particular turmoil and plenty of other problems (including a lack of soldiers and problems with local elections) that keep tripping him up.

War is hell in War Machine but so is trying to decipher the intended trajectory of Brad Pitt’s performance. The fictional character Pitt plays (he was gonna originally play a real-life general but those plans got scuttled) is an over-the-top caricature who should not feel out of place in reality considering the horrifying cartoon character leading our country, but in the microcosm of the movie, Pitt’s performance is too stylized to fit naturally into the movie and there isn’t enough in the way of substance or laughs to make the characters out-of-place nature work. Pitt lathers on a Southern accent and way too many hand gestures (seriously, his hand gestures needed to be reined in big time) that make his performance undeniably a bold attempt at stylized shenanigans that doesn’t coalesce into something that really works.

As for the rest of the supporting cast, they’re thinly sketched but decently fun. The various men Pitt’s protagonist surrounds himself with begin and end as one-note caricatures but the actors behind such individuals (namely RJ Cyler as a tech wiz and Aymen Hamdouchi as a helpful Afghan resident) do make them more engaging. Though he doesn’t have much screentime, Ben Kingsley actually gets the biggest laughs in the whole movie. He’s got some gags relying on misdirection and subverted expectations that tend to be the best jokes in War Machine and there are just enough of those successful gags delivered by a solid cast to keep the first two acts of this feature decently watchable.

But then the third act comes around and everything that’s been played like a more farce-like satire suddenly turns all serious, including a military raid that wants to channel a war movie like Full Metal Jacket but leans closer to a war movie like Pearl Harbor. Even a tortured performance from Keith Stanfield in this extended sequence can’t make it feel more generically made (there really isn’t a single piece of editing or camerawork here you haven’t seen from other better war movies) on its own terms and tonally disjointed from what’s come before it in the rest of War Machine. Director David Michod has some interesting ideas on the Iraq war (which are delivered via narration by Scoot McNairy) but they get dragged down by a number of out of place elements.