Metacritic reviews

Based on the book by syndicated columnist and savvy media watchdog Norman Solomon, who appears throughout as the main talking head, Earp and Alper's documentary shows just how the U.S. government coerces a nation into accepting the very idea of war, and it's a job it couldn't do without the full cooperation of the media.

The doc is sobering, straightforward, and a bit drab, but to the participants' credit, it's also an entirely nonpartisan endeavor. Good luck telling that to the right once they hear the film is narrated by Sean Penn.

Overlapping with other recent documentaries, picture nonetheless presents a stimulating argument.

Unsubtle, condensed and bullet-point simple, “War Made Easy” avoids fancy visuals for a uniformly drab and dispiriting aesthetic. Sporadically narrated by Sean Penn (evincing all the personality of a potato), the movie is cinematically inert if ultimately persuasive.

Claiming that from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq, the US government has misled the public - and the media - on the reasons for going to war.