Mercenary Jamie Shannon (Christopher Walken) is hired to orchestrate a coup in the African state of Zangaro.
After he is captured and tortured on his initial reconnaissance mission, Shannon’s professionalism is infused with a new motive: revenge.
Based on a book by Frederick Forsythe, Dogs of War is concerned with the planning and execution of a coup.
As a teenager, I discovered a book about mercenaries in my local library, and it captured my imagination. It led me to track down a copy of Forsythe’s novel, but I recall only reading at least the first half.
Like Day of the Jackal, the novel is focused on process (probably the reason why I gave up on the book). In this case, it is the moving parts of staging a coup, and then plundering the country for its resources.
We open on Shannon’s last mission, escaping on a plane by effectively hijacking it. An effective bit of action that sums up the difference between Shannon’s crew and regular soldiers: you cannot get paid if you’re dead.
Walken is great - a svelte killer with no wasted motion. He conveys intelligence and experience purely on presence and action.
The novel spends its opening chapters focusing on the corporate machinations prior to the mercenary’s involvement - a massive deposit of platinum has been discovered and covered up so that the corporation can topple the Zangaro government and replace it with a more amenable regime.
Instead, these motives are kept offscreen. The motive for the operation is not revealed until midway through the runtime, by which time it has been revealed Shannon’s team are being shadowed by his employer.
Instead the film focuses on Shannon, and his life at home - while he expresses no desire to get back into the action, he seems listless and lost without a mission.
The first act of the film is taken up with Shannon’s disastrous reconnaissance mission, where he gains a personal stake in the eventual coup.
Director John Irvine would go onto direct the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Raw Deal. This film shares that film’s attempt to focus on character. His approach does ground the material - in a neat reversal of expectations, Shannon initially rejects the offer to lead a mercenary force back to Zangaro.
Ultimately, unlike the novel, this adaptation is an action movie - Shannon is as motivated by revenge as much as by money. This is an emotional narrative that is building toward violent catharsis.
That catharsis gets underway about 30 mins from the end, and ends on a cynical but weirdly subversive button - Shannon assassinates the corporation’s intended puppet.
While it aims for the same process-led approach as Day of the Jackal, Dogs of War lacks the same sense of clockwork precision and mounting tension. A fun watch, but it feels like a rough draft for something more interesting.
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