War machine.

• Author: Slade, Stephanie
• Position: FILM - Television program review - Brief article

No one is safe in War Machine, a new Netflix original feature film about America's conflict in Afghanistan that mercilessly skewers all the parties involved. President Barack Obama and his top political advisers are shown in full cover-your-ass mode. The military leadership are a bevy of arrogant buffoons. Congress won't allow Afghanistan to grow cotton because it would compete on the world market with domestic production, "so we're growing heroin instead." Even the narrator, an embedded reporter, lacks self-awareness: In the old days, he explains, we fought armies in uniforms--"like, Nazis and stuff."

Then there's Gen. Glen McMahon, a barely fictionalized but brutal caricature of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the real-life former commander in Afghanistan who lost his job after his...