War, Inc. (2008)

"War, Inc." is a leftist rant/satire from the mind of John Cusack against the American war in Iraq, Halliburton, Dick Cheney and the American media that's so ill-conceived, I'm thinking of becoming a Republican.

Billed as a comedy in line with "Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," this 2008 independent release only comes close. If "Strangelove" were directed and written by Uwe Boll and a gaggle of international studies college freshmen.

Cusack has the lead role, along with a screenwriting, story and producing credit, as Brand Hauser, an assassin hired by a spectacularly huge private military firm to oversee a trade show and kill a politico in fictional Turaqistan. (Hauser apparently is a take-off of Cusack's charming, witty assassin in the great "Grosse Point Blank," a comedy from the 1990s. Some of the cast from that film, including Dan Aykroyd, appears here in equally similar roles. But I digress.) Having bottled any sense of humanity for years, killer Hauser is beginning to see his conscious bubble to the service. To drown his inner Jiminy Cricket, he downs ungodly amounts of hot sauce. The trick: Concentrate on not crying, and you won't cry.

The film is as obvious and shallow throughout as it is with that psycho babble. The most thoughtful gags involve jokes about Omar Sharif as a terrorost and Aykroyd on the can, describing his ... efforts. War-ravaged amputees are made fun of, U.S. soldiers are depicted in the crudest satire, a whole session is depicted to mocking the murder of Daniel Pearl.

Look, I have no problem with satire and mocking the powers that be, but the war in Iraq and all of its blunders by the Bush administration are far, far too serious for this treatment. Cusack and director/co-writer Joshua Seftel seem to have no understanding of Middle East events greater than any casual viewer of CNN. Looking for blame in the cluster funk-ups that are Iraq, Iran, India, Pakistan and a host of other countries? Try the British and their devastatingly inept "Christian" colonialism campaign of the 1800 and 1900s. America has plenty of blame to carry in Iraq, yes, but we're a late arrival to the party.

The biggest shocker here: Hilary Duff is great as a Britney Spears-in-full-meltdown-clone from Israel who has a secret that's far too easy to guess. So, the girl can act. Huh. But why are Cusack and friends lampooning Spears, her family and handlers? In a war film?

"Strangelove" was brilliant, light, fun, had wonderful characters and stayed on target. None of that is here. To down it all off, Joan Cusack plays a soulless PR hack with nothing to do but use the "F" word ceaselessly and loudly, while Ben Kingsley fumbles about as a CIA boss who fights Hauser in the back of a garbage truck (!!!) and uses a ridiculous white aristocratic Southern accent found only in slave dramas. If Ann Coulter made a right-wing film about the Iraq war, she couldn't do worse. D-