"Yes, we can NOT do things."

Rating: 8/10 (30 May 2017)

I read about half of the sixty nine reviews already posted here for this film, and only two other writers mentioned what I thought was the main idea of this movie. It's a not so thinly veiled effort at memorializing real life General Stanley McChrystal, who's forced resignation as Commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan occurred because of a Rolling Stone article in which he criticized then Vice-President Biden. In the film, his stand-in, Brad Pitt as General Glen McMahon, expresses disillusionment over the short shrift given to his presence on the tarmac at the hands of President Obama, hastily boarding a plane to avoid speaking to a real, hands on warrior.
The film may be a parody in some respects, but what it does is put American military policy in the proper context of being victim to political overreach and oversight. All you have to do is think about McMahon's reaction to 'systemic negation of repetitive procedural practice' to get a hint of what this is all about. When warrior generals are eclipsed by political generals in deference to their civilian Commander-in-Chief, what you have is a recipe for conducting war with no intention of winning them.
Frankly, I'm surprised this film was even made because it's a terrible indictment of military policy under the prior administration. It may be true that "You can't win the trust of a country by invading it", but at the same time, you can't engender troop morale with a policy of 'courageous restraint'. When I first heard about that as an official policy for our troops engaged in the Middle East, it no longer surprised me that upper echelon personnel from our service branches began taking early retirement in droves. Fighting a war with both hands tied behind one's back is more likely to get one killed, and is a message frustratingly delivered by the conduct of troops on the ground in this film.
All in all, Brad Pitt is unerringly brilliant in his portrayal here, even with the mock quizzical look on his face most of the time, because he knows what the score is, and that the game is rigged against him. For his part, Ben Kingsley is hysterical as Afghan President Hamid Karzai, leading his country by not leading it. If ever there was a war film that defined the phrase 'Catch-22', this is it. Watch it for a brilliant demonstration of how military policy has been redefined so as 'not to do things'.