When watching films about real events, recent enough to find people alive and in full possession of their faculties who were there, I find it best to maintain my carefully cultivated ignorance. For any insight makes it nigh on impossible to assess the film on its own merit. Or so I would have you believe.

As Charlie Wilson’s War would have it, the mighty Soviet Empire was felled by a boozy US senator ‘of little consequence’, and the feminine wiles, industrial mascara and sculptural hair of a Texan socialite.

For the most part, I didn’t care, and you won’t either.

Tom Hanks, as the eponymous anti-hero, has far too much fun with Aaron Sorkin’s sparkling, tongue-in-cheek screenplay for the Cold-War politics to get much of a look-in. But, if you insist, a whistle-stop summary:

With not so much aid, as coercion, from old flame and frankly terrifying Republican Amazon Joanne Herring (Sarah Palin? Pah!). A Bible-thumping ‘former Miss Cotton Bowl’, with cash, indomitable hairspray, a killer body, and political nous (Julia Roberts) as well as the backing of Jesus, through whom Charlie Wilson finds himself inadvertently moved by the plight of displaced Afghans attempting to beat off the Soviets.

While his devoted staff attempt to wrangle an impeding sex-and-drugs scandal, Charlie and his assistant (a suitably snippy Amy Adams), chip away at the general governmental indifference, financial issues and the small problem of the US being actively seen to arm a Muslim country on Israel’s watch. Along for the ride, for want of anything more exciting to do, is gruff, magnificently mustached CIA agent Gust Avrakotos, (the estimable Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Charlie Wilson’s War gets as near to a gung-ho piece as is palatable for most at present, which is to say, not very – although it does pull a sly bait-and-switch, with a stirring, flag waving opener in which Charlie gets a slap on the back from the ‘clandestine services’ before all the fun starts.

Very little is treated with its due reverence here. From the screaming Afghan villagers being mown down by Russian aircraft in something that looks like a cross between a twisted game of Ten Little Indians and something out of Star Wars, to an almost-pastiche of the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ helicopter sequence in Apocalypse Now. Then there’s the self-satisfied Russian pilots discussing their girlfriend woes before being blown to smithereens by the plucky brown folk in, variously, Pakistan/Uzbekistan/Somewhere Else American Officials Have Barely Heard Of that isn’t Afghanistan.

In the process, Charlie Wilson’s War probably achieves more, and more memorably for most of us black-hearted cynics than any number of worthy preach-pieces.

There’s added piquancy in ripe guest roles from Ken Stott and Om Puri, as an Israeli arms dealer and the Pakistani president, respectively, some god-awful belly dancing, and Charlie Wilson’s spectacularly undistinguished military record and diplomatic faux pas – not for him the ‘war hero’ re-election angle, I suspect.

That’s it. As to the rest, it’s a bevy of impossibly beautiful women with legs up to their armpits and names that ought to end in ‘i’, featuring, among others, Emily Blunt (The Devil Wears Prada, The Young Victoria, My Summer of Love) and Shiri Appleby (Roswell, ER) astonishing sums of money, and dismal short-sightedness. Hot tubs, horrific suits and the slow, protracted death of disco. But, in there somewhere, despite Charlie Wilson’s billing on the DVD case, as a romp through recent history, an outrageous con, there lies a serious point.

There’s danger, it seems, in taking things at face value. Beneath the good-time-all-the-time exterior, Charlie possesses a conscience; beneath Joanne’s God-bothering and brittle, us-gals-together shtick is a shrewd single-minded operator, for better or worse. There’s a neat sideswipe at America’s conflicted attitude to its famous melting pot of migrants. And, as a prescient Gust hints to Charlie, there’s danger in little boys growing up into angry young men in a debilitated, isolated country, for once Charlie’s war ends, luck deserts him, and he’s unable to wheedle the cash for building schools as he once did for some very big guns.

See, now I’m getting all, eugh, topical and real world again, when I promised I wouldn’t. So, it’s off to bed with a cold compress and my well-worn copy of The American President.