Oscar Cleanup: "Charlie Wilson's War" Review - Written by TonyD

“Charlie Wilson’s War”
2007
***½ out of ****
Director: Mike Nichols
Cast: Tom Hanks, Amy Adams, Phillip Seymour Hoffman


“As the Congressman says, "you can teach them to type, but you can't teach them to grow tits."” – Wynn Everett, “Charlie Wilson’s War”


The hardest kind of film to review is a film that is based on war. War, whether if it is between your brother and sister or two countries, are terrible nonetheless. It may just be one of those topics that many people can’t find to be fun at all. Believe me, in the past few weeks, I’ve reviewed “The Kingdom” for GeeksOfDoom.com and it ended up being shorter than expected. I’ve been trying to review “Home of the Brave” and I still can’t find the words. “Redacted” and “Stop-Loss” will be coming to me soon, and I can only imagine my thoughts on those two.

But it just so happens that there is a film out there that displays war as a fun topic. “Charlie Wilson’s War,” starring an infinite amount of A-list stars, is one of those movies that if you saw the trailer for, you would be confused about it. It looks like a movie that you would only want to see because of the people who star in it. You can’t really be blamed for it. For such film, you have an excellent lead actor and a fantastic supporting cast that includes Amy Adams, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Julia Roberts. All four of them have been at least nominated for an Academy Award and three of the cast members have won them.

It’s the cast that make this movie fun though. It has been ages since I saw a war and/or political film that screams out, “HEY! WE’RE HAVING FUN HERE!” And it’s true. The characters are bright as can be, whether they want to or not. But the best part about the film is the characters. Tom Hanks shows just how much fun he can have when he is on-screen. His character is so goofy and entertaining that it would take a guy like that to say the word ‘goofy.’ “Charlie Wilson’s War” is a fun flick that is a reliever for films like “Lions for Lambs.”

Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) knows how to have fun. He doesn’t hide it in the opening scene, where he’s party with strippers, doing lines of coke and drinking scotch. The next day, he arrives to work and is asked to raise a one million dollar budget for the Cold War going on between the Afghans and the Russians to send money for weapons to Afghans. He raises the budget to five million dollars… which isn’t good enough. After seeing people in Afghanistan and listening to their stories, Wilson has a change of heart, and decides to do something about everything. Gust Avrakatos (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is a renegade CIA covert who helps Wilson, but not everyone agrees with Wilson and what he is doing…

Whether or not you like this film, you must agree that there is a lot of heart put into it. “American Gangster” and “V for Vendetta” showed us corrupt cops and politicians, and it’s great to know that from what we see, “Charlie Wilson’s War” has none of that. It keeps it straight and to the point. We watch Charlie Wilson feel for these characters and see him take the time to do something since no one else is doing anything. There’s even a scene in the film that goes like this:

“Why is Congress saying one thing and doing nothing?”

“Well tradition mostly.”

Christ I haven’t seen a film so true since the final minutes of “Liar Liar.”

And while the Cold War is not supposed to be a funny topic, whatever Wilson and his buddies do, we’re all laughing at it. Between Tom Hanks and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, you couldn’t ask for a better class. In one of the many hilarious scenes, the most hilarious one is when Hoffman keeps getting invited into Hanks’s office and gets kicked out only seconds later so his secretaries can talk to him. It’s not until the third time that the facial expressions start to make us roll on the floor with laughter. The two have such great chemistry. I wanted to see more of these two together.

One of the authors on the site and a good friend of mine posted a review on their MySpace blog with an interesting sentence. He said that he felt like that he only received one side of the story. There is not a doubt in my mind that this guy is correct. However, that is the point of the film. We’re pretty much seeing the film into the eyes of Charlie Wilson. The guy is doing something no one else WANTS to do, but neither does he and he still has his own image to protect. Then again, while there is a scandal emerging on him, wouldn’t you protect your image also?

Oh wait, I didn’t talk to you about the scandal? I’ve saved this part for the end of my review because that is one of the film’s problems. There is a subplot in the film that deals with the first scene of the film. Some news reporters saw him doing lines of cocaine and hanging out with strippers and he’s trying to prove that he wasn’t. Though I was mighty engrossed within that subplot, it ends on an abrupt ending. I won’t spoil it for people who still haven’t seen the film yet, but I think that it could have ended in a little better way than what the final product was.

Another problem that I had was that it was too short, but that was probably because I was enjoying the HELL out of the film.

“Charlie Wilson’s War” is a lot of fun. If I was to see this before 2008, it would most likely be on my Top 25 of last year. The film leaves an ending wide open so that people can look up to see what has happened after the events took place, though if you really want to know, just turn on your channel three news. It’s probably still on there.