Trailer Trash: War, Inc.

We will fight this war with the most brutal weapon in our arsenal: irony.


The trailer for War, Inc. begins with two literary references piled one on top of the other: H.G. Wells (The Island of Dr. Moreau) and Céline. Gee, you think this movie’s gonna be pretentious?

It’s also the first trailer that could actually have its own soundtrack album. I counted no less than 5 music cues (at least four of which have been in other movies; count this as the second red flag).

Incidentally, 5 is also the number of times the main character of the film, Brand Hauser, has requested my friendship on Facebook. I am assuming that this is part of some elaborate guerrilla marketing campaign and that Brand Hauser is not actually a real person, despite the fact that we seem to have 12 friends in common.

This sort of looks like a sequel to the film Grosse Point Blank on crack. Coincidently, if you ever see me watching a sequel to Grosse Point Blank, you’ll know that I’ve just smoked crack.

This trailer is so all over the place, it’s almost impressive. Ben Kingsley as a tiny southern war-hawk! Hillary Duff as a sexy A-rab pop star! A snake pops out of a suitcase, a scorpion goes down Duff’s pants, and a Popeye’s chicken explodes. Did I mention that John Cusack drinks hot sauce while wearing a ski mask? Hot sauce! Who thinks of these things?!

Nitpicking aside, this trailer suffers from one fatal flaw: a lack of the funny. There are a couple lines, like the LeBron James joke at the end, that made me think, “Gee, that’s kind of funny,” but didn’t actually make me laugh or even chuckle. In a comedy, that’s generally a bad sign.

Some liberals will watch this trailer and think, “Far out, way to stick it to the man.” I’d love to be on that bandwagon, but instead, what I see is an unfunny, unoriginal, pretentious film that promises to be the 20th failed movie about our failure in Iraq. How’s that for irony?