John Cusack and his sister seem to reprise their roles to a certain extent from Grosse Point Blank. He is an assassin and she is his apparent control/secretary. The movie is a serio-comedic movie with a lot of action that takes place in some foreign raghead country. I did not even recognize Hillary Duff as the semi-slut, foul mouthed, raghead pop star. I will say she did look good even with the long dark hair. While her body is still excellent her acting is okay at best in this one. She is nice eye candy but not a great actress at this time. I could not figure out if Tamerlane was a US backed entity or not. But then I did not pay a whole lot of attention to the movie as I was playing on line poker.

John Cusack was just so funny in this,, throw in Dan Akroyd, and you have lot's of laughs,, then throw in the sexy Hillary duff, so America needs to come up with an imaginary war to get the ball rolling on an assassination attempt,, Cusack who plays a down and out hit-man,, didn't we see this before,, lol, so he has to pretend that he is a producer of a trade show,, and he is trying to produce a show that will have a young teen star performing,, Hillary Duff. the movie may not make a lot of sense but really isn't too far fetched as America has almost been trying to involve itself in every war for far to long, excellent movie very funny,, recommend to all.

This 2008 movie hits all my buttons for a satire. Some might call it a black comedy. Directed by Joshua Seftel, it was written by Mark Leyner, Jeremy Pikser, and John Cusack. It stars John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Hillary Duff, Marisa Tomei, Ben Kingsley, and Dan Akroyd.The gist of the movie is that hit man Hauser (played by John Cusack) has been assigned to assassinate the president of some middle eastern country with a made up name. The satire begins when Hauser lands there. The country is being run by an American corporation called Tamerlane. All the occupying soldiers are Tamerlane mercenaries, the equipment is owned by Tamerlane (which sells ads on the sides of its tanks, by the way), and the country basically is occupied by the corporation. Everyone gets a Tamerlane corporate gift bag, including a book entitled "How I Conquered the World and Dealt with Issues with my Father."I won't go into how well the movie nails corporate scumbaggery, occupation by corporate alter egos, and the like. It nails it. Joan Cusack is brilliant. The commercialization of the war in this godforsaken country is funny, and "War, Inc." spoofs all those dumb action movies where the action hero's wife is killed and his daughter is kidnapped: it happened to Hauser twenty years ago, and he has no clue who did it or why or where his daughter is. And he does nothing about it. Nothing. For some reason, "War, Inc." didn't get a great release and was quickly shunted to DVD. (No conspiracies here, though, about corporations censoring the movie.) It got seriously bad reviews. (Of course, there were no corporations putting the kibosh on it, making newspapers require bad reviews from their critics.) I'm not sure what the reason was. I think it's a great movie; see it with a decent sound system for all the booms.On another note, I see this movie as the final film in a Cusack trilogy. My suggestion is that it starts with "Say Anything," where Cusack is paired with Iona Skye. Dobler is a high school grad with nothing going for him. Released in 1989, in "Say Anything" our hero's goal in life is maybe to open a gym and be a kick boxer. Skye plays Dobler's love interest, Diane Court, who's the school's valedictorian on her way to college and a life of brainy success. It has that iconic scene where Dobler stands outside her window holding the boombox over his head as it plays "In Your Eyes."My alternate universe point of view is that Lloyd Dobler went from being a kick boxer to being Martin Q. Blank in "Grosse Pointe Blank." Blank, of course, is a professional assassin who goes to his high school reunion to see his old high school flame (played by Minnie Driver). In "Grosse Pointe Blank" Joan Cusack plays his totally over the top secretary, and Dan Akroyd plays another assassin. Alan Arkin plays Blank's psychiatrist, and those scenes are fabulous. Blank has been assigned a hit during the time of his reunion, and we get to see a lot of conflict as Blank meets his old friends who've led boringly normal lives while he's been killing people. In "War, Inc." Cusack plays a character named Hauser, Joan Cusack plays his totally over the top assistant, and Dan Akroyd plays a vice president. Instead of an analyst, Hauser has "GuideStar," a disembodied voice to talk him through his several problems based apparently on GM's navigation service. (Bill Cusack, brother of John and Joan, plays the "overcaffeinated" soldier delivering the dry-cleaning in "War, Inc.," by the way, and a waiter in "Grosse Pointe Blank.")

The people who made this monstrosity all deserve to get shot in the face by Dick Cheney. It is a dumb, ridiculously caricatured, snotty little mishmash of cartoonish criticisms badly aimed at President George W. Bush and Iraq. Whenever you hear Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or other conservatives whining about Hollywood liberals, films like War, Inc. are exactly what they mean.Brand Hauser (John Cusack) is an assassin in a black suit who's been given a new assignment. He's to go to the Middle Eastern nation of Turaqistan and kill a businessman who's threatening U.S. interests in the region. Hauser is also supposed to be running a trade show that's showing off the latest products of Tamerlane, the company that's been put in charge of rebuilding Turaqistan after invading it with a mercenary army. Oh, and Hauser is supposed to make sure that global pop sensation Yonica Babyyeah (Hilary Duff) gets married to her Turaqi fiancée. While doing all that, he also finds time to romance a leftist journalist named Natlie Hegalhuzen (Marisa Tomei), who's come to Turaqistan to expose what's going on in the country. That's all I'm going to tell you about the plot of this movie because remembering even that much is giving me post traumatic stress flashbacks.Basically, War, Inc. is supposed to be a satire about the U.S. occupation in Iraq and the use of private military contractors as an instrument of American foreign policy. That's what it's supposed to be. What it actually is, is an insultingly awful, nonsensical, arrogant, self-righteous, 107 minute long fart of a film. The story is beyond stupid. The characters have all the depth of pudding skin that's been left out in the Sun to dry. The humor is cringe-inducingly unfunny. The satire has all the bite of a toothless meth addict. The movie's portrayal of Arabs would be racist if it weren't so incompetent that you can't be sure what you're seeing. Even the sets and the costumes look cheap, like they were borrowed from a VH1 dating show. Every second you watch this movie is like getting slapped in the face with a stinky catfish. Every moment you listen to this film is like hearing puppies crying. I actually couldn't view War, Inc. all the way through in a single sitting. I had to stop halfway through, pop myself some popcorn and have a drink of water because it felt like my brain was going to seep out of my ears.Joan Cusack gives the worst performance of her career in this rotting turkey. If a Joan Cusack sex tape ever comes out, I'm sure she'll do a better acting job in that than she does in War, Inc. Hilary Duff is so terrible, this role should end her career. I don't just mean as an actress. Based on her work here, she should never be hired again to act, sing, write, direct or even work security at a studio lot. The only job she should be able to get is something in the field of medical waste disposal.The only way I could make it through this movie without killing myself was to squint really, really, really, really hard and pretend that the Cusacks and Dan Aykroyd were making a sequel to Gross Pointe Blank where Martin Blank was having a very bad acid trip.The only people who should like War, Inc. are George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Condoleeza Rice. That's because compared to the pretentious jackasses who made this movie, they don't look all that bad. Sarah Palin shouldn't have spent the 2008 campaign telling voters that Barack Obama "pal'd around with terrorists". She should have said he pal'd around with these filmmakers. She and John McCain would have won in a landslide.