Todd Phillips’ smug bro adventure stars Jonah Hill and Miles Teller as two adorable twentysomething arms dealers having some pretty wild times in Miami and Fallujah. It puts an excitable spin on the true story of David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli: young stoner dudepreneurs who got rich brokering minor arms deals to the US military and were finally busted for flogging dodgy Chinese ammo. (The movie is based on a 2011 Rolling Stone article about their exploits.)
With its generic hints of The Hangover (which Phillips directed) and the boiler-room machismo of The Wolf of Wall Street (which took Jonah Hill to the big league), this is a strangely tiresome film with little in the way of comedy, preoccupied with reassuring the audience of its savvy satirical credentials by perpetually telling us how amoral arms dealing is – but yet how funny and cool these particular arms dealers are.
Jonah Hill does a reasonable job as the outrageous opportunist; Miles Teller is his easily led buddy, the regulation good person and the audience’s point of sympathy contact. He only got into this business because – yeah, right – he needed to provide for his new baby, whose existence enables a deeply boring role for Ana De Armas as Teller’s sad-eyed girlfriend, left worrying why he’s out so late and what he’s up to.
It’s a slippery piece of narrator’s special pleading also beloved of Brit true-crime geezer pics. So is the incessant use of freeze-frame voiceover. Jonah and Miles are not a classic buddy-comedy hookup.
