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This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

I realize some parts were supposed to be funny but the portrail of Albania was insulting. And if you film this in Romania and try to pass it as Albania, do a better job of it. At least try! You could not show recognizable buildings or licence plates. And I was offended by the fact that the only time someone spoke 'Albanian' (the woman looking for her husband) it was in fact Romanian. Make the minimum effort to have someone speak Albanian and do not offend other countries by your laziness.

Miles Teller, who looks and sounds a bit like John Cusack, is a nice Jewish young man, just trying to get along in Miami by giving massages and selling first-class sheets to the many old age homes. His wife, Ana de Armas, doesn't really care. But Miles' life course is full of bumps. He meets an old high school friend, plump Jonah Hill, who involves him in a money-making scheme selling armaments and ammunition to the US Army. Maybe some others. I was lost from time to time.Well, I'll tell you, the money rolls in. It rolls in in barrels, visible even through the cloud of smoke from all the weed they do. There are cascades of one hundred dollar bills. They drive Porches. And all those thousands of first-class sheets of Egyptian cotton that Miles had bought? He and Hill make a mountain of those boxes and jubilantly set fire to them. Their arms empire grows. It expands from two ambitious guys to a vast international group of shady characters. The flow chart turns murky. What the shady characters are doing is outside the box but apparently legal enough, though dangerous. Then they discover that some AK-47 ammunition, left over in Albania from the Cold War, was made in China. It's illegal to sell Chinese-made ammunition to the US Army. So they set about anxiously repackaging the millions of dollars worth of ammo, from heavy wooden crates to fiberboard boxes, which gets rid of the Chinese ideograms on the wooden boxes.But somebody squeals and one by one the organization is taken down by the FBI.This sound a little complicated, and it is, but we're helped along by Miles Teller's matter-of-fact narration. He tells us what's going on every step of the way, often during a freeze frame. There are overhead shots. There are vicious arguments with the wife. Hill, who is the springboard for all this chicanery, turns out to be a perfidious boss. There is judicious use of contemporary pop music from the likes of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. The deployment of cuss words is unfettered. One of Jonah Hills' previous performances was in "The Wolf of Wall Street." This could easily have been directed by Martin Scorsese. In fact, if you didn't know it wasn't, you might think it was. Perhaps it most closely resembles "Casino", with Jonah Hill in the Joe Pesci part -- the guy who just pushed a good thing too far. The structure also owes a lot to Scorsese's "Goodfellows", with Miles being taken up into illegal activities while explaining in the narration exactly how it works. One might call the movie "The Wolf of Albania." That's not bad. If you're going to steal from someone, steal from the best. And there are funny moments. Miles Teller and Jonah Hill are about to have an extremely important meeting with some US officials regarding a huge arms deal. The meeting will take place on the upper floor of a huge office building. They're nervous so they decide to get stoned before the tête-a-tête and they approach the meeting half wrecked. The duo walk down a long hall, their footsteps clicking loudly on the stone floor. Hill stops. "Wait a minute. Does it sound to you like there are other people in this hall?" Miles replies, "Yes." Okay, satisfied, they begin walking again.It may be imitation Scorsese but it's a good imitation. Brian De Palma's near constant imitation of Alfred Hitchcock became an irritation after a while, but as long as director Todd Phillips finds his own vision, sooner or later, I don't care. I enjoyed the hell out of it.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning In the summer of 2005, David Packouz (Miles Teller) makes a living on Miami Beach, giving back massages to wealthy clients for peanuts. Then, at a family funeral, he crosses paths with Efram (Jonah Hill), a brash young guy of about the same age, whose made a killing by making online arms deals of depleted army stock that the US government no longer needs, and wants to bring him in on the deal. But as the boys delve deeper into this murky world, the risks get greater and everything conspires to fall apart around them.When it comes to war, and the politics and motivations behind it, we're living in a far more cynical, acutely self aware age, where people are no longer falling for the jingoistic, stirring rhetoric used to whip up support for it, and can see beneath the surface of what it's about just fine. And so a different type of film emerges, in the shape of War Dogs, where our heroes aren't rounded, noble figures, but shady, arrogant ba$tards who are really operating behind the scenes. Sadly, despite the potential, the film isn't the soaring hit it should have been.Director Todd Phillips seems to have a background in mainstream comedy films, including The Hangover series, and while this is billed as a comedy itself, the darker tone and more uneasy subject matter make it harder to see in this way. Performances wise, Hill has never played his obnoxious American arsehole act to such great effect, making his Wolf of Wall Street character practically Paddington Bear, whilst Teller provides fine support as the slightly more restrained other guy. There is a neat sense of style, savvy Goodfellas style narration and some cool dramatic moments, but none of it comes off in quite as coherent and satisfying a manner as one would have hoped.If you want a film with a morally conflicted protagonist making a killing during war time, Lord of War with Nicolas Cage (which, ironically, was released in the year the film is set) is a more satisfying option. **

Lord of War isn't that bad a comparison and throwing a bit of Wolf of Wall Street (with a tighter two men approach to it), you would say that comparison nails it. This is based on something that really happened and just the way it is portrayed is kind of mesmerizing. You wouldn't think some of those things would be possible. Would actually apply to the real world ... but apparently they do.Being the Devil's Advocate is one thing, getting greedy another. But you could almost argue it's human nature. And you wouldn't be too far off. Although obviously some do have a moral compass even when it doesn't always work, it may set off at some point and remind them of something they want and something they are or aren't. You may be shocked at how easy some things where back then, but that's life ... and it's really all about the ... Benjamins