War, Inc. (John Cusack, Hillary Duff, Joan Cusack, Ben Kingsley, Dan Aykroyd) – You have to admire John Cusack. As an actor and a writer, he rarely plays it safe and doesn’t seem to care all that much about commercial success. This $10 million or higher indie production pulls out all the stops in parodying movies like the Bourne series and all those drug smuggling, foreign assassination, gun-running films. The premise here is that the war in Turaqistan, your basic former Soviet state, is being run for the first time by a foreign corporation. The company, Tamerlane, is owned and run by the former Vice President of the United States, played by Dan Aykroyd, in what amounts to a cameo. Cusack reprises the role he played in Grosse Pointe Blank, an assassin with a heart, who works for Tamerlane. His real-life sister, Joan, plays that lovable, odd-ball and off-base assistant – just like she did in Grosse Pointe. Her “cover” job is to orchestrate an international conference right in the heart of the foreign country featuring Tamerlane’s cacophony of products. Her name is Marsha Dillon, not to be confused with the sheriff in Gunsmoke. All this is set amidst the superstar marriage of a popular young sexpot played by Hillary Duff and a local member of the royal family.
Cusack, as Brand Hauser, is to assassinate a local thug and businessman named Omar Sharif (yes, you heard it right). But his hand is starting to shake and he’s taken to drinking shot glasses full of hot sauce to get up the courage to do his job. Ben Kingsley plays Hauser’s old boss at the CIA, who trained him, and who Hauser thought he was rid of years ago. This, by far, is the strangest Kingsley role ever and the most bizarre of the trio of films I talked about today. Hard to believe he thought this film was worth his Oscar-winning time.
The rest is violent, funny, stupid, silly and ridiculous, but that’s the point. But the idea is better than the execution. And the film, which the producers must have hoped would play the big theaters, instead has seen limited distribution. This isn’t a bad film – the audience we were with ranged from loving it to a couple who walked out – but it suffers from not being carried off by experienced spoofers like Mel Brooks, Ben Stiller and the old Airplane movie duo of Jim Abrahams and David Zucker. War, Inc. is entertaining but misses by just enough to fail at the box office.