'War' hasn't a clue about how to be a funny dark comedy

It would have been nice if John Cusack's new movie "War, Inc." had worked.

A would-be savage satire of the mostly botched war in Iraq, pitched in the dark comic mode of "Dr. Strangelove" or "Catch-22," the movie makes points well-worth making: about "privatized" government and warfare, venal geopolitics, modern supercharged political corruption and media whoredom.

Plus there's a terrific cast that includes John and Joan Cusack, Marisa Tomei, Ben Kingsley and Dan Aykroyd.

The subject matter is a violently satirical slant on war-torn Iraq, redubbed "Turaqistan," and viewed through the wary, cynical eyes of a pro hit man named Hauser (writer-producer-star John Cusack).

Hauser is sent to the war zone disguised as a trade show producer for the Halliburton-like corporate monolith Tamerlane to assassinate Omar Sharif (not the actor/bridge player but a fictitious Middle Eastern oil nabob, played by Lyubomir Neikov).

Hauser finds himself caught up in a series of misadventures, bloody fiascos and unholy messes that include street warfare, romancing with Tomei and babe-sitting for a flirty Turaqistani pop star named Monica Babyyeah (played, in a brave move, by teen pop goddess Hilary Duff). The whole adventure is masterminded by a sinister Wizard of Oz-ish CIA-style heavy named Walken (played not by Chris, but by Kingsley).

The script, by Cusack, novelist Mark Leyner ("Et Tu, Babe") and "Bulworth" screenwriter Jeremy Pikser, takes pretty gutsy potshots at everybody from Vice President Dick Cheney (done by Aykroyd, literally, on the pottie) to the Nation's photogenic editor/TV pundit Katrina Vanden Heuvel (whom Tomei turns into a lefty sexpot called Natalie Hegalhuzen) to real-life pundit John McLaughlin, who satirizes himself.

The daringly broad tonal shifts go all the way from take-no-prisoners ridicule to mad farce to surprisingly poignant wartime drama and grief.

But the movie has a crippling flaw for a dark comedy. Dark it may be; funny it's not.

"War, Inc." begins to go wrong right near the start, with a joke sequence in which Hauser chugs hot sauce and blazes away in a bar: an obvious riff on the Clint Eastwood-Sergio Leone Westerns. That should be an easy style to have fun with, but the whole sequence limps along.

Scene after scene thuds away, no matter how outrageous the material - whether dancing amputees, hints of incest or a hot sauce called "Napalm Girl."

You might tend to blame the script, except in this movie, where the jokes fall flat, one cast member actually delivers a sensational comic performance. As Hauser's shrewish Tamerlane contact Marsha Dillon, Joan Cusack racks up the laughs seemingly at will.

Joan's easy steal tends to confirm that the main problem here lies less with cast or script and more with "War's" direction, which doesn't establish the same comic style, tone and energy with everybody and everything else.

First-time fiction feature director Joshua Seftel has hitherto made only documentaries ("Taking on the Kennedys") and one comic short (2003's "Breaking the Mold"); he may simply be out of his element.

Cusack, who is at his best here in his more serious scenes, is lucky he had sister Joan around for some laughs.