Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

Boy, this one’s sneaking into release, isn’t it? And it’ll be on video before we even finish the summer’s theatrical releases. That’s crazy. This looks like a return to the sensibilities of something like GROSSE POINT BLANK for Cusack... but is it? Does it work?

Here’s one reader’s take, sent from Canada, where the film opened Friday theatrically:

Hey Harry,

Long time reader, sent in a couple things in the past. The new John Cusack movie, War, Inc. opened here in Toronto this weekend before it premieres in New York and LA. Since I'm pretty sure we're some of the first audiences to see the thing, I thought I'd share my thoughts.

The basic plot is that, in the future, government subcontracting has got to the point where entire wars are now carried out by corporations and their mercenary armies. It's a none-too-subtle satire of companies like Halliburton and KBR and how they're currently operating in Iraq. Cusack plays Hauser, a particularly good mercenary brought in by the company to execute a foreign leader that threatens the company's monopoly on oil. His cover is that he's producing a trade show for companies looking to slice up the reconstruction contracts to fix up the country they just got paid by the government to demolish.

And in terms of the politics of the thing, the point it's trying to make about how fucked up the situation currently is and where it's inevitably going to end up... it's a solid message. Disaster Capitalism is something more people should know about, so points to the filmmakers for raising a very serious and very current issue. It's just a pity that the movie built around the issue is pretty crappy.

The on-message stuff, as I've said, is pretty good, but for some reason the filmmakers decided to add a lot of goofy shit that mostly falls flat. The bit in the trailer where Marisa Tomei is doing the hostage thing and says one of the conditions of her release is the national basketball team getting LeBron James... that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the lame jokes in this thing. It's not a total waste -- I did laugh at a couple points and the movie does have a message worth listening to. But Cusack, who co-wrote and produced the movie, is neither Michael Moore nor Naomi Klein, and though it's obvious he loves their work, he should let it speak for itself because in trying to make it accessible to a wider audience, he's largely failed. By making War, Inc. his heart was in the right place but the execution just wasn't quite where it needed to be.

If you use this, call me El Fuego.