The very funny Iraq war satire War, Inc. plays like Idiocracy meets Halliburton. Ben Kingsley plays an evil mastermind in a fitted suit painting something like Guernica by numbers. (Subtle this movie isn’t.) As a CIA muckamuck, he mimics Dubya’s overly aggressive hand gestures, stiff, arm-swinging walk and acquired Southern accent. With a gun he resembles his Polish-American hit man from You Kill Me.

The privatized war is carried out by an outfit called Tamerlane, named after Shah Rukh’s father and Babur’s grandfather, a pre-Mughal warlord with Mongol blood. Its logo is bone white on a field of blood red, reminiscent of the adolescent-chic logo of Blackwater. It’s run by Dan Ackroyd doing a pretty decent Dick Cheney. The chief orders John Cusack, cast against type as the hit-man Hauser, to kill a Hamid Karzai-like president intent on doing his own oil pipeline deals.

The opening scene of Hauser conducting a hit remind me of Rutger Hauer’s chilling, efficient roboassassin. But he’s deeply human. Like the cumin-chewing Rumi in Gifted, Cusack gulps hot sauce in times of stress and moral revulsion because he can’t let himself cry. When he meets an idealistic reporter played by Marisa Tomei, he reflexively tries to bed her before genuinely growing to admire her, and the chemistry is real. Or perhaps it’s just Tomei’s wide-eyed sincerity rescuing the role, as in every second-rate comedy since Only You. Joan Cusack plays Hauser’s aide, as wired and disjointed as her sleepy-eyed brother is natural. Hilary Duff is much better than you might think as crazed, slutty Central Asian pop star Yonica Babyyeah.

Parts of War, Inc. make reference to 1984, X-Men and Apocalypse Now. But this isn’t just a dead-on parody of war profiteering, with cranked-up mercenaries running on amphetamines and the thrill of killing. It’s also a vehicle for a Ben Kingsley to play a modern-day Strangelove. He’s not just hammy, in this year’s cinema he’s inescapable.

The trailer: