War, Inc.

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

Politically-themed movies have been doing so poorly at the box office that the powers that be have decided to only give War, Inc. a brief limited release -- now, the same weekend as Indiana Jones, natch -- before immediately releasing it on DVD July 1st.

So I'm no fool -- I know nobody is going to see this movie. But if you're a fan of John Cusack, and his Grosse Pointe Blank persona in particular, you really ought to. It's the kind of flick that could develop a cult following over the next couple of years (especially if things in the Middle East continue to go just about as well as they've been going for the past five years.)

I first saw Grosse Pointe Blank at a very impressionable age and thought John Cusack was just about the coolest guy ever. Sure, he's a hitman, but he only kills the bad ones, and he's so laid back about everything! Now imagine that same character, only more high-strung, and thrown into a badly-reconstructed Iraq into situations that seem created out of the mind of Dr. Strangelove himself.

If you just went to yourself, "Wow, it sounds like a complete mess," well, you wouldn't be alone: the flick has been trashed by critics, which kind of surprises me. It is a mess -- just in a highly entertaining way. The movie moves, has you watching closely, and the jokes -- well, they fling about ten per second at you, so a few of them are bound to fall flat, but the ratio's actually not bad.

The plot, best as I can gather: in a near, unspecified future, the U.S. has invaded a country called "Turaqistan," – or more accurately, a massive corporation called Tamerlane, owned by the disgraced ex-Vice President (an uncredited Dan Aykroyd), has invaded it. He sends his hitman Brand Hauser (Cusack) into the country's safe zone to kill a foreign diplomat, and as a cover, Hauser is put in charge of organizing the concert and wedding of a young Middle Eastern pop star named Yonika Babyyeah (Hilary Duff, who does a good job playing a pop star, although her character is actually handled with surprising care, given the last name). Along the way, he falls head over heels for a leftist reporter; when she's played by Marisa Tomei, how could he not?

Yep, there's a lot going on, and the film is riddled with so many running jokes and Easter Eggs that I want to see the movie again just to try to catch everything I didn't the first time. (Tamerlane has brought Western capitalism to Turaqistan,