THREAT LEVEL Capaldi shows Addison who’s in charge.

This scathing satire brilliantly channels the doublespeak of the Bush administration into a comic style. Opening with the fallout that results when a British cabinet minister (Hollander) makes the mistake of saying that war is unforeseeable (as opposed to the official line—“neither foreseeable nor unforeseeable”), it shuttles between London and Washington to show us the run-up to an unnamed war in the Middle East. To those with their fingers on the trigger, facts don’t matter when you control semantics (it’s not the war committee; it’s the Future Planning Committee). Meeting minutes are altered to reflect “the more full record of what was intended to have been said.” Elected officials sit by silently while spin doctors—the most aggressive among them Capaldi’s fast-talking Scotsman—run the world.

Sundance comparisons to Dr. Strangelove may seem overblown, but In the Loop—despite a simple, Office–like veneer (Iannucci created the BBC series The Thick of It)—has certain similarities. As in Kubrick’s masterpiece, a hilarious pile-up of egos leads to inevitable tragedy. The film slowly turns up its lightning-paced banter to a howl of outrage. As an analogue for the run-up to war with Iraq, the movie may let the real-life parties off the hook too lightly, but like last year’s Burn After Reading, it’s proof that sometimes comedy makes the most satisfying muckraking.

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