Film

Another Southland Tales? Already? Like Richard Kelly’s—yes—superior dystopic extravaganza, War, Inc. tries to get its head around a world where bombs are going off, but the media is driven to distraction by pop tarts and brand names. Once again a hit man, Cusack plays Hauser, the fixer for the Halliburtonesque Tamerlane Corp., who in the near future is dispatched to the “Emerald City” of Turaqistan to kill an oil minister named Omar Sharif (Neikov). Tamerlane controls all of Turaqistan—as the Blade Runner opening scrawl tells us, corporations have usurped most political power on Earth—but that doesn’t explain why Hauser’s cover should involve supervising the wedding of the Arab world’s Britney, Yonica Babyyeah (Duff, in what may be a career best by default), or a musical revue in which an amputee kick line dances to “New York, New York.”

With the free-association machine stuck on fast-forward, it falls to a reporter from The Nation (Tomei) to serve as the movie’s moral center—and once the earnestness kicks in, the satire deflates. Kelly’s movie followed its own peculiar logic; for all its half-baked ideas, it was a funny and paranoid free-fall into the abyss. However frantic, War, Inc. is a more conventional story of a mercenary who gains a conscience, along the way mugging with his superior (Kingsley, who should be deknighted) and a Cheneyesque VP (an insufferable Aykroyd). The movie is purely out of control, but as a bizarre cultural artifact, it may endure.