War Inc. - John Cusak's strike at the Bush Administration

John Cusack is outraged at the right-wing government running America, at an unpopular war in Iraq and at the multinational corporations using taxpayer dollars to support it.

His solution? To co-write, co-produce and star in War Inc., a film that imagines an absurdist near-future that sardonically lampoons the present.

"What's happening in America is so savage and so dark that ... absurdism is the best way to go at it," Cusack said yesterday, following a sneak preview of the movie at Ryerson University. It opens April 25.

Cusack stars as Hauser, a hit man/fixer sent on assignment to a fictional Middle Eastern country where war amputees dance in chorus lines, tanks carry corporate advertising and a popular chicken franchise acts as a front for the evil military/industrial complex.

"What's lacking in America is the sense of outrage at the viciousness of this ideology that would reduce government ... to basically just an ATM for defence and weapons companies," Cusack said.

Cusack lambasted a right-wing ideology that preaches the "free market" while allowing corporations to hire private armies for protection and security, at taxpayers' expense. "It's corporate welfare. So the whole idea that these guys are saying `the free markets,' the hypocrisy is so blatant," Cusack said.

Co-writer Mark Leyner said many U.S. citizens threatened to move to Canada following President George W. Bush's re-election in 2004.

"No offence, but I don't think that's a solution. So I think as an alternative to moving to Canada, we make things like this," Leyner said.

Leyner said that since the war's beginning, the American people have been living in a state of "a suffocating conformity, (told) to just go along ... with this war."

John Cusack, who joked the film was made in Bulgaria with "no money," noted it was not supported by the traditional Hollywood machine.

"It's hard to get something like this made. You're sort of like a salmon swimming upstream. When we made it, there was great resistance in terms of the regular funding routes and people at the very top of the corporate food chain in movies. People just didn't want to talk about it, or `We don't see the world that way' or `It's not that funny.' So I go, `Well, we weren't really making Wedding Crashers,'" Cusack said.

But John Cusack senses a change in the usual complacency among his fellow citizens.

"People are waking up in America and they're grumbling, and I think they realize that parts of the country have been taken and sort of disgraced, and I think they're ready to sort of fight back."