The story is developed around a young man, having financial problems like many young men, feeling the responsibility of providing for his family. He randomly meets again an old friend of his that really looks he is not having any problem in paying for meals. It turns out that such friend has a small activity where he sells guns to the US army. Our protagonist joins the company and the two of them start facing bigger and bigger challenges to sign up bigger and bigger contracts and be able to afford bigger and bigger meals. Things eventually go over their head and they got in bigger and bigger troubles.
As you can see, the story it is not very original in its development, but absurd (in a good way) enough to be entertaining. The ground material is very valuable and the plot flows almost always from point A to point B, without messing around too much. To be fair, I found a couple of small subplots to be unnecessary at the point that probably I would have enjoyed more a movie 10/15 minutes shorter.
The actors' performances are overall very convincing. Special mention to Jonah Hill, that is confirming himself to be a great actor, pulling off a great performance yet again.
What I didn't like about the movie is that it lacks in personality. It seems to me that they wanted to keep a bright tone while narrating very dark events. They are telling a very upsetting story about how the army is getting its weapons, but it looked to me that the movie doesn't take a stand on that matter. It looks like it is denouncing something, but it doesn't really do that. I can't really define it better than just saying: the narration is too flat.
In other words, it is a movie of half measures.
Probably they could have achieved a much better result by explaining the transitions in the behavior of the characters, that are, instead, something that simply happens on the screen. This is a common risk in movies based on true stories (and the reason why it is not my favorite genre). Since the facts narrated really happened, the movie makers often think that we, the viewers, do not need much to be involved in the plot or in the psychology of the characters.
In conclusion, the experiment of Todd Philips of moving from the Hangover trilogy to a serious movie was bold and the result shows all the difficulties that one may encounter in such transition.
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