War Machine (David Michôd, 2017)

Brad Pitt stars as a blood-and-guts general sent to Afghanistan to bring the country under control, predictably soon finding that this is a war unlike any other he's known before. He ploughs on undeterred, fuelled by rhetoric and tortuous reasoning, but all the while the ground slips away from under him.
It's a satire with obvious targets, shooting fish in a barrel even without the unnecessary voiceover hammering the point home, and uneven of tone - Ben Kingsley doing the Afghan President Karzai, a faux-naif washing his hands of any involvement, is close to rehashing his comic turn as The Mandarin out of Iron Man 3, while for a spell near the end, with the troops engaged in a firefight in some ruined town, it seems to want to have The Hurt Locker cake too.
Nevertheless, Pitt gives the general out of his depth a wounded pride alongside his blatant ridiculousness, and while it is heavy-handed, to say the least, in how it spells out the anti-U.S. Middle East crusade argument for the viewers, these days you have to conclude that the American public in particular need this kind of approach, all else having failed.

5/10