Arms and the Men.

Rating: 7/10 (29 July 2017)

Miles Teller, who looks and sounds a bit like John Cusack, is a nice Jewish young man, just trying to get along in Miami by giving massages and selling first-class sheets to the many old age homes. His wife, Ana de Armas, doesn't really care. But Miles' life course is full of bumps. He meets an old high school friend, plump Jonah Hill, who involves him in a money-making scheme selling armaments and ammunition to the US Army. Maybe some others. I was lost from time to time.
Well, I'll tell you, the money rolls in. It rolls in in barrels, visible even through the cloud of smoke from all the weed they do. There are cascades of one hundred dollar bills. They drive Porches. And all those thousands of first-class sheets of Egyptian cotton that Miles had bought? He and Hill make a mountain of those boxes and jubilantly set fire to them. Their arms empire grows. It expands from two ambitious guys to a vast international group of shady characters. The flow chart turns murky. What the shady characters are doing is outside the box but apparently legal enough, though dangerous. Then they discover that some AK-47 ammunition, left over in Albania from the Cold War, was made in China. It's illegal to sell Chinese-made ammunition to the US Army. So they set about anxiously repackaging the millions of dollars worth of ammo, from heavy wooden crates to fiberboard boxes, which gets rid of the Chinese ideograms on the wooden boxes.
But somebody squeals and one by one the organization is taken down by the FBI.
This sound a little complicated, and it is, but we're helped along by Miles Teller's matter-of-fact narration. He tells us what's going on every step of the way, often during a freeze frame. There are overhead shots. There are vicious arguments with the wife. Hill, who is the springboard for all this chicanery, turns out to be a perfidious boss. There is judicious use of contemporary pop music from the likes of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. The deployment of cuss words is unfettered. One of Jonah Hills' previous performances was in "The Wolf of Wall Street." This could easily have been directed by Martin Scorsese. In fact, if you didn't know it wasn't, you might think it was. Perhaps it most closely resembles "Casino", with Jonah Hill in the Joe Pesci part -- the guy who just pushed a good thing too far. The structure also owes a lot to Scorsese's "Goodfellows", with Miles being taken up into illegal activities while explaining in the narration exactly how it works. One might call the movie "The Wolf of Albania." That's not bad. If you're going to steal from someone, steal from the best. And there are funny moments. Miles Teller and Jonah Hill are about to have an extremely important meeting with some US officials regarding a huge arms deal. The meeting will take place on the upper floor of a huge office building. They're nervous so they decide to get stoned before the tête-a-tête and they approach the meeting half wrecked. The duo walk down a long hall, their footsteps clicking loudly on the stone floor. Hill stops. "Wait a minute. Does it sound to you like there are other people in this hall?" Miles replies, "Yes." Okay, satisfied, they begin walking again.
It may be imitation Scorsese but it's a good imitation. Brian De Palma's near constant imitation of Alfred Hitchcock became an irritation after a while, but as long as director Todd Phillips finds his own vision, sooner or later, I don't care. I enjoyed the hell out of it.