Lord of War
Lion’s Gate Films
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Jared Leto and Ethan Hawke.
The Verdict: “Lord of War” goes beyond a typical Hollywood redemption flick, using grit and choice to tell the story.
Movie: 3 out of 4 stars
Extras: 1 out of 4 stars
Yuri Orlov’s story is your typical rags-to-riches American dream come true. Well, maybe not typical.
Bored with working at his parents’ restaurant in Little Odessa and depressed by a life going nowhere fast, he decides to take up a new vocation-black market arms dealing. Before the first body falls Yuri is a millionaire, and things are looking up because the weapons business is a booming one with no signs of declining consumer demand.
Yuri has no room in his trade for morals. He never chooses sides. He’ll sell to anyone, anytime, as long as the money’s good. He’s a Ukranian born immigrant who rejoices over the fall of the U.S.S.R., but only because it frees up a whole new cach? of dust-collecting Soviet firepower for his auction block. He sees dollar signs in bullet wounds. He’s the best at what he does, and he knows it.
Yuri is not a nice man. Get used to him. He’s the antihero at the cold steel heart of “Lord of War,” writer-director Andrew Niccol’s provocative film about the intricacies of the international arms trade as seen through the eyes of its heaviest hitter.
Nicolas Cage is all slippery charm and shameless salesmanship as Yuri, a man gaining the world at the expense of his soul. Cage’s hangdog eyes reveal occasional flashes of doubt and despair that his character will never, can never, allow himself to feel. He’s boastful of his sales record and still “makes calls and pounds the pavement” to reach a broader clientele, but he’s prone to rationalizations as well. When he tells others that his products kill fewer people per year than cigarettes and car wrecks, he’s really trying to sell himself on the idea.
His work affords him a lavish lifestyle. He keeps his loser brother (Jared Leto, nicely rebounding from “Alexander”) in and out of rehab with mountains of cocaine. He’s got willing girls in every port of call, a chauffeured limo and a penthouse on Park Avenue. He even lands a supermodel as his trophy wife. He dresses in the finest suits and trots to every war torn corner of the globe, briefcase in hand and artillery in tow. He sells his products with deadpan matter-of-factness, as if he were hawking aluminum siding, praising a trusty machine gun for its reliability and cost-effectiveness. Yuri is a big businessman whose merchandise just happens to bring about the occasional genocide.
Niccol (writer of “Gattaca” and “The Truman Show”) mines Yuri’s contradictions for grand satiric effect, especially in the character’s cynical, blackly comic narration. “After the Cold War, the AK-47 became Russia’s biggest export. After that came vodka, caviar and suicidal novelists,” Cage drolly recites. It’s the rare voiceover that doesn’t add depth to the main character; it shines a harsher light on his surface. Yuri really is as shallow and lost as he first seems.
The film recognizes Yuri’s moral dilemma–brokering death to the highest bidder, but it never feels sorry for him or offers an easy out for his increasing number of problems. In “Lord of War,” morality seems to come too late, after the bullet’s already left the chamber, or not at all, and always with a price. Yuri’s wife (played with appropriate blandness by Bridget Moynahan) knows her husband doesn’t make his money legitimately, but she doesn’t ask questions and never refuses a handout until a persistent Interpol agent (Ethan Hawke) shows up at her doorstep telling her the jig is up.
This is no Hollywood-ized redemption story. This is a message picture with a healthy dose of politics on its mind. Niccol lobs his acerbic arsenal at too many targets, but sometimes he scores hits that leave lasting wounds, especially when he draws a bead on the inconsistencies of U.S. foreign policy.
Niccol makes his arguments with cutting wit and style. His opening credits sequence qualifies as one of the best stand-alone scenes of last year, following a bullet, from said bullet’s point of view, from the assembly line to a shipping crate to the barrel of a gun to, finally, devastatingly, the shattered skull of a young African villager. All the while, Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” wails a solemn warning in the background.
“Lord of War” is a fine examination of topical material, in addition to being highly entertaining.
It’s a pity, then, that the DVD release of the film is such a dud. A facts page on the Internet Movie Database states that the tanks used in one scene were supplied by a real underground arms dealer and that funding for the film had to come from overseas because U.S. studios were afraid to touch such a hot potato. Niccol’s thoughts on these and other matters would have proved insightful, but Lions Gate has skimped on extras, with nary a commentary or featurette anywhere in the mix.
What you do get is a grab bag of previews, ranging from the highbrow (“Grizzly Man”) to the lowbrow (“Waiting”) to the inappropriate (a discomfiting ad for “Ultimate Avengers,” a comic book cartoon with the type of amped-up, consequence-free mayhem “Lord of War” works so hard to debunk), a spare main menu with a somber score that abruptly cuts off and replays every 20 seconds (a pet peeve of this critic), and an ungainly “stop-the-violence” plea recorded by Cage, still in full character dress, on behalf of Amnesty International.
When the DVD isn’t watering down the film’s messages, it’s sidestepping them altogether. Even without extras, however, “Lord of War” is worth a look. It aims high, fires a lot of good shots, and, more often than not, hits close to the bull’s eye.