Pitt's oddly jokey performance as General Glen McMahon tends to overwhelm everything going on around him. That's too bad, because this anti-war satire has barbs a'plenty for pride, ignorance and the American can-do spirit.
PopMatters
May 26, 2017
Perhaps it's a case of honoring the literary source material too much, as War Machine fundamentally fails as compelling cinema. It's not smart enough to be a think piece and not visceral enough to evoke anger.
I wouldn't be surprised if some observers say Pitt made huge miscalculations in his acting choices with the result being the worst performance of his career - but I found it to be a brazenly effective piece of work, well-suited to the material.
No actor plays dimwits quite like Brad Pitt. And they aren't just regular old dimwits: They're the sort of bafflingly idiotic, all-star dimwits you couldn't picture using a spoon properly, let alone solving that pesky Middle East crisis.
Brad Pitt pushes the role of a rogue general too far into caricature and defangs the film by forgetting that world leaders and policy wonks don't mean a thing if they're not flesh and blood.
