War, Inc.

"War, Inc, a new political satire co-written by and starring John Cusack, reminds us that it's possible to agree with a movie's agenda while simultaneously despising the movie itself," writes Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "A thuddingly heavy-handed comedy about corporations profiting both from wars and from their aftermath, the film contains not one honest-to-goodness laugh."

"Over these years of war and occupation, Cusack has become one of the most insightful commentators on a far too seldom discussed aspect of the occupation: the corporate dominance of the US war machine," writes Jeremy Scahill for the Nation. "Cusack is no parachute humanitarian. While he continues to do the Hollywood thing with big-budget movies, he is simultaneously a fierce, un-embedded actor/filmmaker who has been at the center of two of the best films to date dealing with the madness of the Iraq War [Grace Is Gone and War, Inc]. Without big-money sponsors and the backing of powerful production companies, Cusack has spent a lot of his own money on these projects."

Updated through 5/24.

At Movie City News, Noah Forrest, a serious fan of Cusack's since Grosse Pointe Blank, finds this one "a colossal failure that really does not work on any level. It's really hard for me to say that because I went into this film wanting so much to love the film and every time I felt the film about to pick up, it just shoots itself in the foot. What makes it especially difficult is that it is clear from the writing of the film that there are intelligent and creative people behind the project."

"This must be the pandering liberal Hollywood circle-jerk studio execs wanted when they poured millions into Southland Tales," sighs Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine.

For the New York Times' David Carr, this is "a satire that goes over the top and stays there." He calls up Cusack, who's in London, "where he is filming Shanghai, about an American expat visiting that city right before Pearl Harbor," and adds, "Those who suggest that the [War, Inc's] core premise - war as a profit engine - is so five years ago are right in a way. Mr Cusack and his co-writers, Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser, have been grinding away almost since the start of the very long war it takes aim at."

Joshua Holland talks with Cusack for Alternet.

Meantime, Tatiana Siegel reports in Variety that Cusack has signed on for Roland Emmerich's "apocalyptic thriller" 2012.

Updates, 5/22: Mary Lyn Maiscott talks with Cusack for VF Daily.

"It's certainly more audacious than your typical Cusack vehicle, which might've been fine if Naomi Klein's ideas on disaster capitalism - a major inspiration for the project - hadn't been filtered through an atonal jumble of quasi-Strangelovean histrionics, absurdist slapstick, sudden melodrama and violent action, and then still offered as pointed or relevant criticism," writes Aaron Hillis in the LA Weekly. "Antiwar, anti-Bush, anti-corporate, yet neither as progressive nor half as funny as the Harold and Kumar sequel, War, Inc squanders some top-tier talent (Marisa Tomei, Sir Ben Kingsley) as well as our patience."

"Joshua Seftel's satire War, Inc might not be as non-stop laugh-out-loud funny as intended, but somehow I didn't care," writes Marcy Dermansky.

Aaron Hillis talks with Leynor for the IFC.

"Even less funny than Southland Tales and not nearly as adventurous, War, Inc brings new levels of desperation and botched satire to the anti-Bush, Strangelove-wannabe genre," writes Bill Weber in Slant.

Updates, 5/23: "[I]t is a zany, nihilistic free-for-all that goes soft," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "What bracing misanthropy War, Inc is able to conjure in its early scenes is sabotaged by the presence of the film's prime mover, John Cusack, an actor who even when playing the ultimate cynic can't keep from coming across as a misguided nice guy on the verge of seeing the light."

... to Andy Klein.

"[I]f it isn't a bomb, the film's about as messy as our own current situation in the Middle East," writes Craig Phillips.

"Somehow, what starts as a series of cheap shots in a barrel develops into something more, thanks largely to warm, engaging performances by Cusack and Tomei," writes Carina Chocano. "War, Inc is both right-on and somehow off, but it gets points for trying." Also in the Los Angeles Times, Tina Daunt meets Cusack.

For Nicolas Rapold, writing in the New York Sun, finds War, Inc "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."

"It's too soon to laugh about Iraq, and it'll never be time to laugh about it with this kind of maladroit humor," argues Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir talks with Cusack, too.

Update, 5/24: Another Cusack interview: Amy Goodman.

Posted by dwhudson at May 21, 2008 11:38 AM