War, Inc.

[Joanne98]

John Cusack’s second hitman mission, War, Inc., takes aim at neo-cons, Halliburton and disaster capitalism — with a little help from Hilary Duff
BY JASON ANDERSON

That a contemporary American movie with a major star could be as gleefully gonzo and (self-) righteously pissed off as War, Inc. might astonish even a Fox News commentator. Sometimes wrong-headed, often ham-fisted, this pet project for actor, co-writer and co-producer John Cusack feels absolutely attuned to the tenor of our times. And as he notes in an interview when he and co-writer Mark Leyner came through town in March, “To get it written and financed at the height of American jingoism, we were pretty much like deranged salmon swimming upstream.”

Inspired by sources as diverse as the Canadian documentary The Corporation, the Iraq War exposé Generation Kill, Naomi Klein’s recent writings on disaster capitalism and even the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, War, Inc. is a full-bore attack on what America’s neo-cons, warmongers and globalizers have wrought. It’s a risky move, but Cusack hedges his bet by essentially retrofitting one of his best-loved movies. As in Grosse Pointe Blank, he plays a hitman who comes to wonder if he’s in the right line of work. Except this time, the character’s infamous “moral flexibility” is hardly particular to his nature — in fact, it’s the prevailing condition of the world around him.

For his latest mission, Brand Hauser (Cusack) has been sent to the fictional, freshly bombed Asian country of Turaqistan to help a Halliburton-like corporation shore up its control by killing a meddlesome minister. He’s also put in charge of overseeing the photo-op wedding of Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff), a trashy Turaqi pop star. Hauser’s crisis is compounded by his attraction to a liberal journalist (Marisa Tomei).

Angry, funny and messy, War, Inc. shares its dystopic bent with Southland Tales and Idiocracy, two other valiant and over-ambitious satires about the imminent decline of the American empire. But to the new film’s credit, there’s no ambiguity about its choice of targets. “There’s a tradition in theatre and the carnival and commedia dell’arte where you’re skewering the rich and powerful,” says Cusack. “In the modern world, we have a corporate aristocracy now — presidents don’t matter quite so much.”

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http://www.eyeweekly.com/film/feature/article/25319