“It’s nice to know there are still some heroes out there making sacrifices so I can go play dress up,” says Geoff Stults, “and I loved playing dress up on this one.”
Stults co-stars with Chris Hemsworth, Michael Shannon and Michael Peña in 12 Strong, the tale of one of the most successful missions in military history. In just three weeks, 12 Green Berets, with the help of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, battled the Taliban to take back the occupied city of Mazar-i-Sharif.
Based on Doug Stanton’s non-fiction book Horse Soldiers, 12 Strong is both conventional and unconventional in its approach. Structured like a traditional war film, it’s also the first time in memory we’ve seen modern warfare on horseback on the big screen. Once in Afghanistan, the Green Berets discover the best method of transport through the rocky and treacherous terrain is on the back of a horse.
“I grew up part-time in Colorado so I grew up with trail rides,” Stults says. “Certainly hadn’t been on a horse in years. The first day of getting on this horse was interesting.
“The wranglers would throw marks on the ground and we would have to ride up and stop and hit our marks-ish. The good news is the horses were trained better than the actors were trained. They knew what they were doing but they’re temperamental animals. Sometimes they didn’t want to stand there on a weird angle, on a weird hill, for 10 takes in a row while the actors got their lines right. Harder than riding was getting the horses to stay still. Between takes, just to keep the horses chill, we’d be moving them around.”
As the first American soldiers to take on the Taliban on their home turf after 9-11, the soldiers portrayed in 12 Strong endured impossible odds, outgunned and outnumbered 5,000 to 1.
“These guys were already in service and said, ‘What are we going to do to make sure nothing like this ever happens again?’ It’s a story about 12 guys who were willing to make what could have been the ultimate sacrifice.”
Stults is quick to mention that the movie is not only an American story.
“9-11 happened on American soil,” he says, “this is an American skewing story but it wasn’t an isolated American experience. It changed all our lives.
“It is also about the people of Afghanistan and their heroics. This couldn’t have happened without them and Gen. Dostum’s partnership. These people have been occupied, oppressed, dealing with the Taliban coming in and out of their villages.”
“12 Strong” tells the tale of one of the most successful missions in military history. In just three weeks twelve Green Berets with the help of General Abdul Rashid Dostum of the Northern Alliance battled the Taliban and inhospitable terrain to take back the occupied city of Mazar-i-Sharif.
Chris Hemsworth leaves the mighty hammer of Thor on Planet Asgard to play the earth bound hero and Green Beret Captain Mitch Nelson. On leave when 9/11 happened he immediately reported for duty, asking that his team be reinstated to fight the Taliban. “You break his team up,” says Chief Warrant Officer Cal Spencer (Michael Shannon), “and you cut the head off your most venomous snake.” Named Task Force Dagger, they are shipped off to Afghanistan with orders to team with Northern Alliance General Abdul Rashid Dostum (Navid Negahban). Outgunned and outnumbered 5000 to 1 this uneasy partnership must endure impossible odds to defeat the Taliban on their own turf.
Based on Doug Stanton’s non-fiction book “Horse Soldiers,” “12 Strong” is both conventional and unconventional in its approach. Structured like a traditional war film, it’s also the first time (to my memory) we’ve seen modern warfare on horseback on the big screen. Once in Afghanistan the Green Berets discover the best method of transport through the rocky and treacherous terrain is on the back of a horse. In a clash of old and new, the cavalry battle tanks and rocket launchers and it makes for some striking images.
Like so many war flicks before it, in it’s opening minutes we see Nelson, Spencer and Sergeant First Class Sam Diller (Michael Peña) with their loving families before they are sent to battle. It’s standard shorthand to create empathy for the characters. They are family men driven by a sense of duty to their country. All well and good. We’ve seen it before but actors like Hemsworth, Shannon and Peña rise above the cliché to bring some heartfelt moments to those scenes. But what about the other nine guys in the troupe? We never learn much about them and, as a result, they are just bodies on a screen instead of fully rounded characters.
Having said that, for every war cliché—“Let’s get this war started,” howls Nelson at one point—there is another scene that offers insight into the difficult and confounding task the men have ahead of them. There is much talk of the struggle of fighting an ideological war against people who believe their great reward is in the afterlife. “There’s no playbook for this mission,” says Nelson. “We have to make it up as we go along.” As the first American soldiers to take on the Taliban after 9/11 they face a steep learning curve, finally coming to understand that this will be a war of small victories with no clear endpoint. They may win the battle but still need to fight the war. The confounding nature of this situation will be familiar to anyone who has followed the news coverage of the war in real time but is concisely summed up by Dostum. “There are no right choices here. This is Afghanistan. The grave of many empires.”
By definition the term ‘war dogs’ refers to “bottom feeders who make money off war without ever stepping foot on the battlefield.” In the film “War Dogs” Jonah Hill plays Efraim Diveroli, a true to life 20-something arms dealer who fits that description to a tee. Richard sat with HIll to discuss the film on the CTV NewsChannel.
By definition the term ‘war dogs’ refers to “bottom feeders who make money off war without ever stepping foot on the battlefield.”
In the new film War Dogs Jonah Hill plays Efraim Diveroli, a true to life 20-something arms dealer who fits that description to a tee.
“You try to understand why someone would end up like that,” Hill says when I ask how he got inside the head of the fast-talking character. “It might be a combination of wiring, lack of empathy, ego and insecurity and obsessiveness. I don’t know. I try to approach it from a therapeutic point of view. Get into the psychology of why people behave the way they do. Probably most actors do that.”
He wasn’t able to meet the real-life Diveroli but he was able to piece together the character without a face-to-face.
“I would always prefer to meet the person but if someone was playing me in a movie I would give them the best version of myself. A lot of times when you meet the person you end up having to be a really good editor, choosing what to include, but always I found meeting the people around them ends up being more helpful to me because they are giving you a warts-and-all portrayal of the person at that time.”
Hill found that version of Diveroli from many sources.
“I had a lot of help,” he says. “I got to meet David, who Miles (Teller) plays, and a few people who knew Efraim at that time. The biggest key was that they are from Miami and Miami culture is very specific. There is a very big sense of the American dream there, in a positive and negative way. There’s a big immigrant culture. People from Cuba and Haiti end up in America for the first time through Miami. Efraim is a corruption of that (American) dream.”
In the film Efraim is a self- described “Ugly American,” a borderline sociopath for whom belligerence is a default setting.
The unhinged nature of the character and Hill’s venal glee in playing up the worst in human nature keeps War Dogs interesting but some audience members see it differently.
Recently a crew of South African arms dealers approached Hill in a restaurant after seeing a trailer for War Dogs.
They were impressed and wanted to high five the actor. He says the same thing happened after he made Wolf of Wall Street, another film where he played a morally ambiguous character who struck a chord with the very people it was satirizing.
“A lot of times Wall Street bros will come up to me as if the movie is their Goodfellas or Scarface. People see what they want to see. It is a little scary sometimes when people misinterpret.”
He describes the run in with the arms dealers as “uncomfortable.”
“You don’t want to make it an overly uncomfortable environment while that is happening,” he says, “but you also don’t want to lie and be dishonest that you are agreeing with them. You don’t want to make them feel bad about their misinterpretation. It’s an unusual an awkward situation to be sure. In the end, we all want to be seen as heroes in our own story, I guess.”
In “War Dogs,” the new film from “The Hangover” director Todd Phillips, war profiteer David Packouz (Miles Teller) describes how arms dealers think. We see a soldier in battle, he sees $17,500, the cost of outfitting GI Joe with weapons and gear. “War is an economy,” he says. “Anyone who tells you otherwise is either in on it or stupid.”
When we first meet Packouz he is a twenty-something massage therapist father-to-be barely making ends meet. His fortunes change when his childhood friend Efraim Diveroli (Jonah Hill) recruits him to sell weapons to the U.S. military. Taking advantage of new rules regarding the allocation of military funds, they bid on small contracts, profiting on deals that aren’t big enough to attract the attention of huge players like Halliburton. “I live on crumbs like a rat,” says Diveroli, “and when you’re dealing with the Pentagon you can live on crumbs.”
It’s a lucrative business. Claiming “we’re not pro war, we’re pro money,” they soon have matching Miami condos, Porsches and an appetite to get a bigger slice of the “gold rush in Iraq.” Enter Henry Girard (Bradley Cooper), a legendary arms dealer rumoured to have sold the government the rope used to hang Saddam Hussein. With his shady connections—“This is the job,” Efraim says, “to do the business with people and places in the US can’t deal with directly.”—David and Efraim make the biggest deal of their lives, a $300 million contract to arm the Afghan Military. It is smooth sailing until they realize they’re in over their heads and greed and hubris
Based on Guy Lawson’s 2011 Rolling Stone article “The Stoner Arms Dealers,” the main hurdle “War Dogs” faces is the obnoxious nature of its main characters. David and Efraim are, to varying degrees, are not likeable but luckily Teller and Hill make sure they are watchable.
Teller plays David as a guy caught up in the fast pace even though he’s in way over his head. Of the two bros, he’s the everyman, the character we’re meant to identify with and the actor makes us understand—but probably not agree with—his choices. He makes terrible decisions and it takes him too long to grasp the moral and legal repercussions of his actions (MILD SPOILER ALERT) but at least he eventually does.
Hill has a steeper mountain to climb. By definition the term ‘war dogs’ refers to “bottom feeders to make money off war without ever stepping foot on the battlefield,” and Efraim, a fast talking “Scarface” aficionado, lives up to the description. He is a self described “Ugly American,” a borderline sociopath for whom belligerence is a default setting. The unhinged nature of the character and Hill’s venal glee in playing up the worst in human nature keeps “War Dogs” interesting even when the filmmaking gets choppy.
“War Dogs” is an odd beast. It’s a star driven message movie that condemns the Pentagon procurement process while balancing elements of satire and intrigue. Films like “The Big Short” breathe the same air, but take deeper breaths. Phillips has made a film that entertains but remains a character study rather than a searing, insider’s look at the business of war.
