The Dogs of War

Happy 4th of July everyone!

John Irvin's The Dogs of War (1980) is a reasonably-close adaptation of the Frederick Forsyth novel. This film retains the structure and basic plot of the book, while adding a few frills. It remains a highly entertaining film, despite some questionable elements.

Jamie Shannon (Christopher Walken) is a veteran mercenary living in New York. He's approached by a British industrialist to organize a coup d'etat in Zangara, a small African nation possessing the world's largest supply of platinum. Imprisoned during a reconassiance of the country, he narrowly escapes, and finds himself ambivalent about going further. When his ex-wife (JoBeth Williams) rejects his efforts at reconciliation, Shannon goes forward with the job, leading a team of killers to affect the coup.

Frederick Forsyth's cynical, intricately-plotted, exhaustively-detailed thrillers are fascinating reads, and have proven a fruitful target for film adaptations. Fred Zinnemann's remarkably-faithful, pitch-perfect adaptation of The Day of the Jackal (1973) remains the high-water mark. The Dogs of War is more conventional material, presented in a fairly unconventional way: it keeps Forsyth's attention to detail while making it a might more accessible to mass audiences.

This adaptaton retains the harsh edge of Forsyth's work. The mercenaries are not the romanticized heroes of most Hollywood films: they're hired killers, borderline psychopaths with no pretense of morality - Drew (Tom Berenger) goes primarily to escape his pregnant wife. The mission is a blatant power grab, destabilizing a country and slaughtering its government (albeit a cruel dictatorship) for an industrialist's insatiable greed: foreign policy and macroeconomics at their crudest. This atmosphere is only broken in the ending, reminiscent of The Professionals, where the mercenaries find a conscience only after the job is completed.

The biggest deviation from the novel is the characterization of Shannon. Forsyth's books are generally short on character, and thus Irvin and screenwriters Gary DeVore and George Malko try and make Shannon more conventionally sympathetic. Shannon tries to bond with a street kid, is mistreated in a Zangaran prison, visits a Doctor for his injuries, tries to reconnect with his wife. This is a fair enough approach, though it reduces somewhat the multi-faceted, complex plot of the original. Certainly, the more sympathetic and developed view of Shannon makes the ending more palatable: in the novel, it seems a bit of a cop-out. The viewer may make what they like of this change; I'm ambivalent towards it.

Irvin's direction is fine: the movie makes fine use of Belizean locations, and the movie is well-paced and tense throughout. The climactic action scene is excellent, gory, blood-soaked action at its most exciting, and certainly a fine pay-off for all the build-up.

Christopher Walken excells in the lead role, making Shannon a well-rounded, complex and believably damage character. The supporting cast is fairly one-note, though Tom Berenger's (Platoon) trigger-happy Drew, Colin Blakely's (A Man for All Seasons) chatty journalist and JoBeth Williams's long-suffering wife turn in fine performances.

In the balance, The Dogs of War is a fine film. It lacks the strict fidelity of The Day of the Jackal, and does opt for more conventional elements than the novel, but it still delivers what it promises, a mixture of plot and action, and you can't really ask for more.