For critics of the war with an appetite for red meat, War, Inc. will prove filling, if not quite completely nourishing.
War, Inc. (2008)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:77
Fresh:22
Rotten:55
Average Rating:4.5/10
Consensus: War, Inc. attempts to satirize the military industrial complex, but more often than not it misses its target.
Runtime: 1 hr 47 mins
Genre: Comedies
Synopsis: John Cusack plays an assassin in the star-filled satire that takes aim at war. Joan Cusack, Marisa Tomei, Hilary Duff, and Ben Kingsley also star.
Starring: John Cusack, Hilary Duff, Marisa Tomei, Joan Cusack
Starring: John Cusack, Hilary Duff, Marisa Tomei, Joan Cusack, Ben Kingsley, Dan Aykroyd
Director: Joshua Seftel
Director: Joshua Seftel
Screenwriter: Mark Leyner, Jeremy Pikser, John Cusack
Producer: John Cusack, Grace Loh, Les Weldon, Danny Lerner
Composer: David Robbins
Studio: First Look
Reviews for War, Inc.
Look at War, Inc as a back-flipping, over-the-top political farce, and the results are far more pleasurable. Consider the film an unofficial sequel to the 1997 classic Grosse Pointe Blank, and War, Inc. is absolutely wonderful.
The jokes about evil corporations and wartime profiteers and hitmen fall flat, and the last 20 minutes are loud, and violent and ridiculous and endless.
The overall experience is manic, juvenile, and hit-or-miss, as if the auteurs behind Epic Movie were trying to remake Wag The Dog.
Challenges the corrupt military-industrial complex and privatization with such an embarrassingly generic, dated, fish-in-a-barrel aplomb that it's no wonder David Mamet denounced his former life as a "brain-dead liberal."
War, Inc. squanders some top-tier talent (Marisa Tomei, Sir Ben Kingsley) as well as our patience.
Any random five minutes from lefty talk-radio hosts Rachel Maddow's or Randi Rhodes' shows would provide more entertainment and deeper insight into current events.
It is as though the cast and scriptwriters are constantly nodding to one another and admiring their own cleverness.
Sophisticated political satire, ridiculous farce, black humour, spoof, intellectual game playing and comic invention
A wildly free-ranging satire [that] runs riot through a fistful of genre conventions.
This non-nihilistic film is a vision of our political complicity and humane potential.
...there's plenty of material ripe for savage satire out in the world right now, and while I approve of the targets War, Inc. took aim at, I can't say that it ever scored a direct hit.
The politics of War, Inc. are not problematic so much as pedestrian. There's nothing new in embracing the anti-conservative screed to show how off kilter the country really is.
Its comedy too often blunders into meaningless slapstick, with bombs and bloodshed replacing pratfalls and pies in the face.
Not dumb and definitely bold, War, Inc. is too shrill and nervous to really hit its political targets effectively. The humor's dominant tone is curdled, when it needs to be wickedly caustic.
Latest News for War, Inc.
January 21, 2009:
Razzies Name 2008's Worst Movie Nominees
No awards season would be complete without the Golden Raspberry Awards (AKA The Razzies), awarded each year to the very worst movies to hit Hollywood. This year's winners will... More...
June 28, 2008:
Cusack as a mercenary in bulltetproof designer suits and Hilary Duff doing a kinky Arab superstar sexpot shoving scorpions down her crotch, can't save this satire crossing the line between the chaos of war and the chaos of filmmaking. ![]()
More...
June 23, 2008:
Ben Kingsley Is Everywhere ![]()
Think you're seeing Ben Kingsley everywhere lately? It's no optical illusion -- his roles in The Love Guru and The Wackness are just two of the many projects he's got lined up... More...
May 22, 2008:
RT Interview: Joan Cusack on War, Inc., the Unofficial Sequel to Grosse Point Blank
Joan Cusack and her little brother, John, have co-starred in ten films together since the early 1980s; this week they join forces again to skewer the military industrial... More...
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