Tagline: “When it comes to war, America means business.â€
Translation: How much do you really love John Cusack?
The Verdict: Starring and co-written by Cusack, War, Inc. might be a brilliant, incisive satire of Halliburton’s role in the Iraq war. Or it might be a ham-handed, embarrassing mess like its trailer. One thing’s for sure — it’s rare that a leading man gets two chances in his career to play a hit man with romance problems. But where Grosse Pointe Blank expertly managed its deadpan tone, War, Inc. — in which Cusack plays an assassin for the “Tamerlane†corporation, sent to kill a Middle Eastern sheikh amid an American war in “Turagistan†— seems all over the place. Each scene in the trailer is more bizarre than the last, from Ben Kingsley’s Texas accent to Hilary Duff’s Middle Eastern one, from the tanks blowing shit up to Duff dropping a scorpion down her pants. And we’re not convinced, really, that we can totally get behind a movie with a kidnapped reporter (Marisa Tomei), surrounded by masked men threatening her death, played for laughs.