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War Dog

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I saw a silly YouTube video which clipped this movie and I decided to watch it and it was pretty good. The movie is about these two twenty-something year-old arms dealers, Efrain Diveroli (Jonah Hill) and David Packouz (Miles Teller), who capitalize on the flood of US government tenders posted online1 to rebuild the Iraqi and Afghan armies. It’s starts out with David who’s sick of jerking off massaging old men and fails to sell bed sheets to retirement homes. He hangs out with his old friend Efrain who turns out to be an arms dealer2 and joins him, hoping not to tick off his anti-war wife and not get killed.

I enjoyed the thrill of how they smuggle illegal Italian Berettas from Jordan through the Triangle of Death into Bahgdad as well as trying to move 100 million bullets from Albania to Afghanistan which turn out to be embargoed Chinese ammunition they need to launder. Given all the fraud and gunrunning, what screws them over is forgetting to pay the guy who was laundering the ammunition, leading him to snitch. I’m surprised that they each got less than 4 years for doing such things but such is the nature of white collar crime.

It was a fun movie based on real events albeit with a lot of creative liberties. I wish this were a TV show since each smuggle run sounds like it fits in a 60 minute episode.


  1. Interested in selling arms to the US military? Check out sam.gov↩︎

  2. Apparently he started arms dealing when he was 15 after being kicked out of ninth grade? Damn. ↩︎