Another stinker from Netflix

Rating: 4/10 (27 May 2017)

Man, what the heck are you doing, Netflix? I was willing to dismiss Handsome as a inevitable outlier--a lone turkey--but to follow up Handsome with this? It had so much going for it, but the script and pacing sucked. The overall premise sucked. I was super excited for this, based on the trailers, but what I saw was an enormous flop. It reeked of vanity project--and political grandstanding. As if the only point here was to beat us over the head, for two hours, with how pointless counter-insurgency tactics are. Okay, message received, but at the cost of the Netflix reputation.
It seemed, other than a meandering script, that the biggest problem with this film is its perspective: that of a Rolling Stone reporter (who doesn't enter the film, officially, beyond the capacity as a narrator, until the mid-way mark). It's littered with awkward and inconsistent narration by this narrator who only serves to remind us of how dumb Glen, and his counter- insurgency tactics, were. It's patronizing, and not at all humorous. In fact, I felt mostly just bad for Glen for much of the movie. He seemed like an underdog, a guy who genuinely wants to do the "right thing" but is just a little delusional. He's not a bad guy, just a disconnected one.
This film would've been far more successful if it had been a present-tense story, where we see things, not from the doomed memoir perspective, but from the perfect plan (well, not so perfect, as we see) unraveling perspective. If it had been played more from the Dumb and Dumber angle, where you can be in on the joke, rather than from a moralizing perspective. Yes, it's about war, and how absurd it seems modern war is when nation building is being attempted, but let the viewer draw their own conclusions--don't tell us how to think and feel about things. A truly intelligent approach to this same story would be to actually execute on the premise of a comedic war movie which is comedic because it's ridiculous. Period. And do so in a tight, well executed, non-moralistic way. Yes, the audience still would've come away realizing how counter-productive all these "anti- insurgency" efforts are, and they would've been entertained at the same time. Otherwise, you might've just made a (much cheaper) documentary. Granted, Netflix probably wouldn't have funded it to the same tune, and they probably wouldn't have rolled out the red carpet for its release.
But at this rate, I no longer believe that the Netflix brand, especially in self-produced movies, is an indicator of quality. Instead the Netflix brand in movies is becoming synonymous with disappointing movies. They're great at marketing them (the trailers are, without exception, engaging and have driven me to watch Handsome, and now, War Machine), but they're doing a really poor job making an actual decent movie. I'm not even asking for a "great" movie, I'd settle for a merely "good" movie.
This is just a travesty. It hurts watching Brad Pitt and many other great actors, meandering through this pompous, boring vanity piece. It had superb cinematography, and a good sound track, but that was about it. I guess the dialogue was pretty good, even though the overall script sucked (in terms of approach to the story, story arc, pacing, humor, etc).
It's a sad day when I have to push myself to even get to the 50% mark, and then start skipping ahead five minutes at a time just so I can get a sense for how it ends. And let me tell you, the ending? Zero humor. Great moral grandstanding, but zero entertainment value. See, the thing which is brilliant about most modern American media, is how it weaves left-wing values into entertaining content. There are a great many shows whose politics I don't agree with, but which I still enjoy and find entertaining. But this War Machine effort from Netflix is just ham handed, sloppy, and a waste of time. But that's just my feeling on it.
War Machine fails to either be an entertaining dramatic war movie, and it fails (with very rare) exception at comedy as well. At this point I seriously doubt I will trust Netflix's marketing of any future self-produced movies. As the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on you. And there will not be a third time. I just feel offended and insulted and tricked. I trusted the Netflix brand, I trusted their marketing (trailers), and they let me down.