Corporations don’t kill people. People who own and operate other people do the killing. When did a corporation ever get a break on screen, let alone save the day in the last reel? Not in “War, Inc.,” an acidic rip on outsourcing that overkills. Co-producer and co-writer John Cusack plays Hauser, an ex-CIA fixer in the employ of an ex-vice president (Dan Aykroyd). Under the cover of running a Brand USA trade show, Hauser is supposed to assassinate an inconvenient oil conglomerate CEO with the unlikely name of Omar Sharif (Lyubomir Neikov). Hauser is not himself these days. “I feel like a refugee from the ‘Island of Dr. Moreau’—some morally inverted, twisted character from a Céline novel,” he confides to his jet’s GuideStar (voiced by Montel Williams). Two women throw him off his game: lefty reporter Natalie Hegalhuzen (Marisa Tomei) and hottie pop star Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff). Cusack and co-writers Mark Leyner and Jeremy Pikser pack the script with a torrent of op-ed rants. Nearly every scene is an occasion for one political obscenity or another. There’s an Implanted Journalist Experience action ride simulating battle embeds. Popcorn comes with. Pointing to a chorus line of trans-femoral amputees kicking their prosthetic gams, Hauser hypes: “Just another breathtaking example of how American know-how can alleviate the suffering it creates.” Among the lower key touches: the logo for the fictional Tamerlane Industries shares the design (color, font, graphics) of the logo for the real BAE Systems, a global defense corporation based in England. The neo-imperial U.S. corporation in the film also shares the name of the fourteenth-century Tatar conqueror of Damascus, Delhi, Baghdad, Kabul and points in between. Uzbekistan now claims Tamerlane is its founding father. “War, Inc.” is set in fictional Turaqistan, occupied by Tamerlane Industries in the “first war ever to be a hundred percent outsourced to private enterprise.” Director Joshua Seftel breaks no ground in the genre of liberal satire, though. One off-the-shelf plot element is the uber bad guy (Ben Kingsley) spelling out all of his badness—unaware that his words are being transmitted live to the world, which will surely think less of him and do all the right things. “War, Inc.” may tap no new reserves of outrage against war profiteers and D.C. puppeteers, but it barks with rabid black humor. With Joan Cusack, Sergej Trifunovic and Ned Bellamy. 107m. (Bill Stamets)
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