Struggled to find the satire

Rating: 4/10 (7 June 2017)

Having watched several movies calling themselves "satire" and others labelled "black comedy", I started watching War Machine expecting to find some. It wasn't easy. I'm still not sure I found any.
Consider that part of the satire of something like the Colbert Report was the over-the-top earnestness of the main character, believing in ludicrous things and having a sarcastic edge running through everything. Drowning Mona gets laughs and headshakes for, likewise, taking things to extremes. To keep it military, watch The Pentagon Wars as the Bradley Fighting Vehicle is procured. You laugh because things can't possibly be this stupid, and yet (to a point) they are.
War Machine has us watch Brad Pitt's General Glen McMahon nosedive from supreme confidence to confusion to anger to despair and, ultimately, sadness as he realizes that he's a warrior who has been given a war that he can't possibly win, no matter how many strings he pulls. He's a warrior, not a politician, not a diplomat, and not one who loses. And yet, loss is really all he has in his hands, right from the get-go. It's just. Not. Funny.
Pitt plays his caricature of a general very well, and he alone keeps the film moving. He rolls through the early parts of the film like a bestarred Popeye, wondering why people don't get what he feels should be instinctively understood. As we are told, he is a "true believer" whose understanding is that the reason others' attempts to do the same job has failed is because they weren't him. But with every roadblock, every question, and every gobbledeygook answer he has to give, that confidence cracks and breaks down. He lacks the ludicrousness of Colbert and the black nature of Drowning Mona, and never makes it over the top.
Pitt himself has said that the movie exposes the fallacy that "everyone wants what America has" and that American military efforts are really just aggressive exporting of American ideals. This may be true... but, again, it's not really that funny. For me, the biggest laugh is the final clip of the movie, when his successor is named and marches into frame, with the same eagerness and earnestness that Pitt's character has at the outset. "Here we go again" is unspoken, but understood.