My Weekend with Broski: Navigating a Bro-tastic Film Weekend

Our intrepid critic Kristen Lopez navigates a male-centric film weekend and wonders what the appeal is with jerks and the audiences who eat up their antics.

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As a film critic for going on a decade, I’m critical. It’s obvious, but when you see two to three movies a week it’s easier going in with expectations low than high. Couple that with the fact that cinema still cater predominately to young white men, and I usually leave the theater saying, “I had problems with…” But nothing prepared me for this weekend.

This summer has been a bummer, to say the least. The embers of big summer tentpoles remain and there’s been little that’s stuck in my brain-pan since May. But this weekend’s one-two punch of Ben-Hur and War Dogs left me declaring this weekend one of the “bro”-iest on record.

Both War Dogs and Ben-Hur deal with tortured hetero lifemates, navigating international arms dealing, and the invasion of Rome, respectively. It might be unfair lumping Ben-Hur into this article, since it’s bro qualities aren’t as insufferable, but after watching both films back-to-back, they both left me with the same sensation. I’m never one to say I identify with film characters, but this weekend I realized being a white male was a key factor for enjoyment.

Let’s throw Ben-Hur and it’s overpriced bombast aside. (Not like audiences aren’t already doing that.) War Dogs is the main issue here. I saw this with a mixed audience of various genders, but it was the men who ate it up the most.

The story of two arrogant twenty-somethings realizing gun running has consequences is meant to illustrate the horrors of “Dick Cheney’s America” when it’s embracing it. Our protagonists, David and Efraim (Miles Teller and Jonah Hill) are two Scarface-loving jerks who don’t care who they hurt with their schemes. They’re free, white and total jackasses. The idea clearly is it’s satirical. Director Todd Phillips believed he was making his Big Short. But the joke is lost when only the most privileged are the ones to see it as funny.

One of the best examples of how tone-deaf the movie is: when Efraim goes to score pot. He’s ripped off by a group of black guys he meets on the street. Efraim goes to his car, whips out an automatic weapon and start shooting it maniacally into the air, as these guys run for their lives. The audience laughed as if this was the funniest thing in the world. But in a landscape where the awareness of violence against African-Americans by whites has been front page news recently, this entire sequence was scummy and clueless.

Anti-heroes aren’t new in cinema. Characters don’t have to be all good or bad. In fact, Phillips references flawed heroes from Rain Man, The Wolf of Wall Street and Goodfellas in his story. The problem is how this film plays in a world where our Presidential candidate is an egomaniac; he’d probably find Efraim and David charming.

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I left the theater after watching War Dogs demoralized, like I had a layer of scum I needed to immediately wash off. It’s only more confusing looking at various film critic colleagues praising the film. Did I miss something? Is it saying something that the majority of praise is coming from male critics? But we should take heart that War Dogs, like Ben-Hur, found itself dumped in the doldrums of August, weeks before the true Oscar-bait season started. Only a few years ago, studios would have looked at these finished products and seen the next Argo or Gladiator. Now it looks like the “bro” bloom might just be off the rose.