What did I just watch?

Rating: 3/10 (13 June 2017)

Gosh, where to begin...I caught War Machine scrolling through Netflix on a day off and thought I'd give it a chance. Any movie with Brad Pitt can't be horrible right? Sadly, wrong. Perhaps horrible isn't the correct adjective. Painfully mediocre is more accurate.
This painfully mediocre film just simply doesn't know what it is. There are some semi-comedic scenes that prompted a chuckle or two. Was it supposed to be a drama about the war in Afghanistan? The country really only serves as a setting(minus one combat scene) and the many facets of the war there were seldom touched on. Instead you get Brad Pitt doing a VERY, VERY strange tough-guy/chain-smoker accent portraying a 4-Star General in the Army who has about as much personality as a wet blanket. I kept on wanting his character to morph into this cool, savvy, funny, leader...but it just never happened. The film's main focus, I think, was supposed to be about a writer from the Rolling Stone magazine exposing his unit as unfit. This was clear in how the film ended, but during the run-time of the movie, that sub-plot was about fifth down the line of sub-plots in terms of interest by this watcher.
Basically, there's a good movie buried somewhere deep in here. But what we got was a jumbled up mess that struggles to inform the viewer what the movie is really supposed to be about. It's a shame the producers could not compile such interesting topics and ideas into at least an average movie.
3/10