Hangover director Todd Phillips brings his bromance expertise to arms-dealer drama War Dogs

Jonah Hill and Miles Teller are a couple of twenty-something guys who set out to become players in the arms trade, in a black comedy that uses entertainment to bring a serious subject to wider notice

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Director Todd Phillips (middle) with actors Jonah Hill (left) and Miles Teller on the set of War Dogs.

Published: 7:00am, 29 Aug 2016Updated: 5:58pm, 31 Aug 2016

Todd Phillips is known for films about inebriated men making bad decisions (The Hangover series), a road trip shared by a stressed out father-to-be and a lunatic wannabe actor (Due Date), and a group of grown men who start a college fraternity (Old School). His forte is showing adult men doing really, really dumb things. He is, in fact, the originator of the bromance film.

With War Dogs, Phillips again directs two men – played by Jonah Hill and Miles Teller – who get pulled into a morass of trouble because they are young hotshots in the dicey weapons business.

Phillips’ latest is based on a true story, one told in a 2011 article in Rolling Stone magazine about two twenty-something guys – David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli – who came out of nowhere and won a US$300 million arms contract. The story was turned into a bestselling book, Arms and the Dudes. In the film, Bradley Cooper comes over as a sinister, and startlingly good, accomplice.

Is the subject a serious one? No doubt. Is the film funny? Absolutely. This is Phillips, after all. “The main job of a director is the purveyor of tone,” he says. “To take a movie where the tone is a little schizophrenic and deliver on that, that was the exciting part of doing it.”