As far as cynical satires about war profiteers go, War Dogs, directed by Todd Phillips from a script by Jason Smilovic, Stephen Chin and Phillips, is one of the better ones. The story itself, based on a Rolling Stone article by Guy Lawson, is about two young Miami hotshots who fumble their way into getting large weapons contracts with the Pentagon to supply the Iraq-Afghanistan wars.

Since this is based on real people who are still alive, the gaps and the fuzziness of some details are understandable. But the scriptwriters are better than most at maintaining credibility.

It’s told from the point of view of David Packouz, played by Miles Teller, a young under-achiever whose wife is pregnant with their first child. He makes a modest living as a licensed massage therapist who tools around Miami serving rich, sometimes horny clients in their homes. But personal bankruptcy looms when his dopey scheme to sell “prime quality” bedsheets to nursing homes is a bust. So it seems a gift from heaven when Efraim Diveroli, a childhood friend played by Jonah Hill, returns to Miami and wants him to become his junior partner in selling weapons to the Pentagon. And Efraim, a flashy, super-confident character who seems to know just the right lie to tell anyone he gets on the phone, makes it all look so easy.

The first half of the film is breezy and nicely paced.  We learn how Efraim took advantage of George W’s pullback after VP Cheney grabbed all of the Pentagon arms contracts for his Haliburton cronies, which brought howls from the other arms dealers – many of whom were fat Republican donors – who had been locked out. With all of the contracts now open, Efraim can pick and choose the juiciest ones. David soon becomes Efraim’s right hand man, as he can’t resist the big money after his daughter is born. He joins Efraim on a trip to Jordan for a major sale and then goes solo to Albania for a  huge arms deal that, eventually, leads to the FBI’s shutdown of the company for fraud.

It’s with the Albanian deal in the second half that the story bogs down. We spend too much time in an ugly warehouse where grunting middle-European extras repackage bullets so as to hide their Chinese origin, which was necessitated by a U.S. arms embargo with China. Then Efraim gets greedy and tries to cut out his middleman, Henry Girard, played by a sinister Bradley Cooper. But things speed up again with Efraim’s betrayal of David, leading to the split-up of the partnership and the boys selling each other out to the feds.

The final scene is pretty neat: David is approached by Girard to continue the whole operation while Efraim serves time in prison. Suddenly, the naive and trusting David, who’s been narrating the entire film, doesn’t seem so innocent after all. It’s as if everything we’ve been told from his perspective was a con job from the beginning.

Miles Teller and Ana de Armos, as David’s wife, are appealing, and they make some too familiar domestic material seem almost fresh. Jonah Hill’s Efraim, however, remains a murky and unrealized character, for all of the actor’s charisma. Efraim has absolutely no past, and no family, friends or relationships other than David. Everything we “know” about him comes from whatever he says to others, but we’ve no reason to think it’s any more true than the lies we see him tell everyone else. Maybe Hill made him too interesting, and I wanted to know more. At any rate, the lack of background for him may also be due to the multiple lawsuits filed by Diveroli since he got out of prison.

Finally, it should be noted that no government official or employee portrayed in the film is ever made to look anything other than perfectly competent, and dull, but never foolish. This is rather curious since the entire system that enabled these massive frauds of the taxpayer was a government creation. But then again, it seems that the Pentagon cooperated with the filmmakers. Yes, now it does kind of make sense.