I really didn't like this. It's way too long to the point where it feels endless, aimlessly directed and not nearly as biting as it thinks it is. Brad Pitt basically gives a riff on then performance he gave in Inglorious Basterds but he has some moments that land, particularly near the end. It definitely picks up during the last hour - the first hour is pretty insufferable. Lakeith Stanfield also gives another strong supporting turn. The rest of the ensemble cast is underused. Tilda Swinton has a two-minute cameo and strong young actors like John Magaro, Emory Cohen and Will Poulter are completely wasted. I think Cohen has about ten lines. I can see why someone would enjoy it but this was not for me. A shame since I loved Michod's Animal Kingdom and also liked The Rover a lot as well. C

The final cameo at the very end is also really stupid.

I really enjoyed this. It starts off as a very comedic political satire and then turns pretty serious about half way through which I can understand might be jarring to some, but I felt it eased into it well enough. All I could think while watching this though is that this is what Billy Lynn should have been IMO. This film did everything better than what that movie failed at doing and it's kind of sad that while that got a theatrical release this didn't, but I guess I can see the studios not knowing how to sell it outside of Brad Pitt being the star. Speaking of Pitt as good as he is here it's true that his character is just another riff of Aldo Raine from IB, but he has his moments. Lakeith Stanfield definitely gives the standout performance, but I also enjoyed Ben Kingsley's and Anthony Michael Hall's performances. The rest of the cast is kind of wasted though.

This one stings. As an ardent fan of Australian director David Michôd's first two films, the crime drama Animal Kingdom and the minimalist post-apocalyptic chase film The Rover, it is a crying shame his third picture, the big-budget Netflix original War Machine, is a nobly intended, but incredibly flat anti-war satire. The entire experience is just lax and unimpressive: not amusing, not involving, not poignant, and overlong. Brad Pitt, an iconic movie star who has willed himself into being a very fine actor, too, delivers a rare bad performance or at least a deeply miscalculated one. As a heavily fictionalized version of now-retired, quasi-disgraced U.S. Army general Stanley A. McChrystal, his turn is extremely, almost grotesquely broad: a clenched, accented, ultimately superficial parade of gesticulations and tics, as if he were reprising his Inglourious Basterds characters in a topical Saturday Night Live sketch circa the first Obama administration. The buffoonery renders it difficult to invest in his character's third-act humbling, and a certain level of emotional investment is, I believe, the film's intent as hubris gives way to failure and dismissal. And the film encircling Pitt is full of missteps large and small: far too much air time, for example, is given to hyper-didactic, glibly sarcastic voice-over by a Rolling Stone reporter (Scoot McNairy) whose actual physical presence in the story is comparatively small, and the episodic structure results in a series of stops and starts and dead ends. The Europe-set second act goes on forever, functioning as a slow-drip I.V. of cinematic tedium and culminating in a painful scene cutting around a mediocre Obama impersonation. And, Christ almighty, the laughs are just not there, nor is the suspense, and the overarching points regarding military-industrial-complex bureaucracy and the futility of counterinsurgency are old hat, however valid in theory. In this way, War Machine recalls the dregs of the first wave of post-9/11 mainstream political films: remember, say, the heavy-handed non-suspense of Rendition or the oily, overblown, insufferable vacuity of American Dreamz? The few praise-worthy elements include the single sequence of actual combat, which finds Michôd much more in his stylistic comfort zone, and a predictably atmospheric score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

D

Tilda Swinton is here to spell out the film's theme, a job already thoroughly handled by the incessant narration (just without the German accent).

The Russell Crowe cameo as Not David Petraeus is a cool gambit on paper, but the movie is bad, so it lands with a thud.

War Machine

I liked this. It is basically an anti-war summary of the struggle of US forces to leave Afghanistan. War Machine should be required viewing for secondary school students learning about modern US conflicts. It offers fairly shallow insight, which meant that more time could be dedicated to journey of General McMahon, but it has all the main points. Brad Pitt is reliably entertaining, and is surprisingly detached from his Inglourious Basterds character. Very much his own beast here. I do not believe War Machine is vying to be more than it is. It is merely attempting to avoid other Middle East war films and convey the difficulty of the US situation, and it does that well. Michôd's best film to-date.

B+

I enjoyed that very much. It got the laugh from me.