War Inc.: Strengths and weaknesses of the Hollywood left

When it stays on track as a lampoon of a war zone run by a Halliburton-type corporation headed by a Dick Cheney-like former vice president, the movie has many effective moments. However, its detours into the realms of romance and personal redemption are unconvincing, to say the least. Nonetheless, the films passionate stance against the war and the criminals who conduct it is genuine and carries weight.

Cusack plays Brand Hauser, a CIA hit man who knocks back shot glasses of hot sauce to dull his sense of feeling like a refugee from the Island of Dr. Moreau. Some morally inverted, twisted character from a [French writer Louis-Ferdinand] Céline novel. He is ordered by the chief of Tamerlanea huge US defense contractorand former vice president (played by Dan Ackroyd) to assassinate a Middle Eastern oil minister whose plans for a pipeline interfere with the occupation of the fictional Turaqistan by the giant transnational.

In fact, the US government proves to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tamerlane.

Inside the heavily-fortified Emerald City, the authorities organize a huge gala, the Brand USA Trade Show, as a front for the assassination. It is a spectacle that will feature Rockette amputees with technologically advanced prosthetic limbs, incarcerate-anywhere-anytime inflatable Port-O-Prisons and bomb-sniffing mechanical dogs.

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