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Miles Teller and Jonah Hill are gun runners in trailer for Hangover director’s War Dogs

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Warner Bros. Pictures has released the first trailer for War Dogs, the new film from The Hangover franchise director Todd Phillips, and the preview offers our first look at Miles Teller and Jonah Hill as the stoner pals who became international gun runners during the Iraq War.

And the most outrageous part? The film is based on an outrageous true story.

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Phillips’ wartime comedy is based on journalist Guy Lawson’s article for Rolling Stone about a trio of friends who, in their 20s, exploited a government initiative allowing small businesses to bid on big-time government contracts during the Iraq War. Lawson later chronicled their story in his 2015 novel Arms and the Dudes.

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War Dogs casts Moneyball actor Hill and Whiplash actor Teller as two guys living in Miami who manage to win a $300 million contract to supply weapons during the war. Their subsequent efforts to fulfill that contract while still making a profit end up putting them in the crosshairs — both figuratively and literally — both home and abroad.

The film features a script co-written by The Hangover franchise writer Phillips, as well as Stephen Chin (Another Day in Paradise) and Jason Smilovic (Lucky Number Slevin), and is the first film directed by Phillips since the 2013 franchise-ending sequel The Hangover III. Previously in development under the working title Arms and the Dudes, the film was originally expected to star Jesse Eisenberg and Shia LaBeouf, but was later recast with its current duo.

Along with Teller and Hill, the film also stars Ana de Armas (Knock Knock) and Oscar-nominated Silver Linings Playbook and American Sniper actor Bradley Cooper. Phillips, Cooper, and Mark Gordon (Steve Jobs) serve as producers on the film.

War Dogs is scheduled to hit theaters August 19.

Rick Marshall
A veteran journalist with more than two decades of experience covering local and national news, arts and entertainment, and…
The best documentaries on Netflix right now
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Even this month's top pick, Untold: The Murder of Air McNair, fits into true crime. For variety's sake, the rest do not. Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond is a Hollywood documentary about Jim Carrey and the late Andy Kaufman, and The Only Girl in the Orchestra is about giving a veteran musician her due. One of the more recent arrivals, Don't Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, really is about a man who is doing everything he can to live as long as possible.
You can find these films and the rest of our picks for the best documentaries on Netflix below.
We’ve also rounded up the best documentaries on Amazon Prime Video and the best documentaries on Hulu if Netflix doesn’t have what you’re looking for. Need more recommendations? Then check out the best new movies to stream this week, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+.

Untold: The Murder of Air McNair (2024)

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Keanu Reeves in Constantine Warner Bros.
The Lord forgives. So, in time, do film critics, whose snap judgements can be as severe as the punishments of a vengeful god. There was certainly some Old Testament fury to the reviews that crashed like lightning upon Constantine, the 2005 Vertigo comics adaptation that cast Keanu Reeves as an existentially bummed anti-hero, sending unruly half-demons back to Hell with a cigarette dangling from his sneering mouth and a middle finger raised high. But the movie, which turns 20 today, has aged better than you might imagine, given its initially damning reception. Maybe this minor Hollywood hit simply benefits by comparison to what passes for a special-effects spectacle in our current fallen world.
Constantine was Keanu’s first starring role after the conclusion of the Matrix trilogy, and no one could help reaching for unflattering comparisons. (Of course, the Matrix sequels were considered disappointments, too, before being reclaimed in the years that followed.) Certainly, there were parallels to draw between the messianic rise of Neo and the misadventures of John Constantine, another messiah of sorts, able to see the secret design of the world around him and forced to save his fellow man from a shape-shifting, incognito threat. Constantine simply made the religious subtext of The Matrix into text, trading Descartes for scripture.
Fans of the Hellblazer comic had plenty to complain about, too. The film was conceived without the blessing or involvement of Alan Moore, co-creator of the character and revered creative godhead with a grudge against the Hollywood system bastardizing his work. Constantine, which predates the fan-courting fidelity of modern comic-book movies, is what you could call a very loose adaptation. It relocates the action from Liverpool and London to Los Angeles, while refiguring the famously blonde title bloke into a dark-haired American goth, a neo-Neo. (The short-lived NBC series hewed a little closer to the Constantine of the page.)
Constantine | Official Trailer 4K Ultra HD | Warner Bros. Entertainment
Reeves wouldn’t be any diehard’s first choice to play a character modeled on the rock star Sting. All the same, he’s a lot of fun in the role — the exorcist as chain-smoking noir detective. “God’s a kid with an ant farm,” he says, with a cynicism that would make Humphrey Bogart proud, even if he was too cool to show it. Can we really blame this salty holy man for his angst? In the revised backstory cooked up by screenwriters Kevin Brodbin and Frank Cappello, John attempted suicide as a teenager to stop the visions of angels and demons running through his head — a mortal sin that plummeted him to Hell for two minutes that felt like forever, and which guaranteed he’d eventually return for permanent damnation. Keanu’s performance carries the bitter burden of that knowledge. He’s soulfully miffed.
The plot of Constantine is silly and convoluted. It involves the unearthed Spear of Destiny (that is, the lance that supposedly poked and prodded Christ on the cross), the ambitious son of Satan, twin psychic sisters played by Rachel Weisz, and a collaboration between Heaven and Hell meant to bring about a thousand years of darkness or something. But there’s lots of fun around the edges of the story, particularly in the matter of handing its hero Men in Black-style tools of the trade. Constantine consults his own version of James Bond’s tech support, Q; loads up sprinklers with holy water; sports brass knuckles with cross indentations on them. At one point, he shakes down a half-demon played by Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale by threatening to send him not back to inferno but up to paradise, where they don’t take too kindly to minions of Beelzebub.

Tilda Swinton in Constantine Warner Bros.
The cast is better than you might expect or remember. Reeves and Weisz invest the melodrama and exposition alike with dignity, as through they weren’t headlining a goofy graphic-novel riff on Catholicism. This is also a movie that secures a pre-Oscar-winning Tilda Swinton to play mad, androgynous half-angel Gabriel — a character, and performance, that deserved more screen time — and Coen-brother regular Peter Stormare as a gloating, eccentric Lucifer. The weak link, naturally, is Shia LaBeouf, though it’s not really the then-rising star’s fault: His character, an eager getaway driver and sidekick, feels shoehorned into the proceedings, as though the studio felt that such moody material demanded some broad comic relief.
Constantine could definitely be scarier. Its vision of Hell is a bit of a bust — a blazing City of Angels that’s like something out of a bad Terminator sequel. And most of the unholy attractions are weightless digital phantoms, conjured through CGI that now looks like the one element here that has aged badly. You might wish that the movie gave us more of Constantine on the job, trudging to work like the Almighty’s most put-upon exterminator. The first set-piece, in which Keanu trash talks the evil spirit that’s turned some innocent girl into a post-Y2k Regan MacNeil, promises a thriller at once funnier and more intense than the one we get.
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Constantine is available to rent or purchase from the major digital services. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.

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