Review of Lord of War (2005) by Sma A — 21 Aug 2012

***SPOILER ALERT***.

"They say evil prevails when good men fail to act. What they ought to say is; evil prevails.".

It doesn't take a genius to tell you that if an industry is criminalised, people will pay to keep its wheels in motion, and people will pay a lot. With money flying from party to party, a power struggle will always be pounced upon by an organisation with brains. Look at US government prohibition - through organised crime, it inadvertently granted a huge boost in power to the private underground factions; most notably the Mafia. Arms exports at the hands of private 'businesses', however, is a much greyer area. In this context, there is a distinct difference between what is illegal and what is immoral.

Lord of War is not exactly a subtle take on the subject. It's a grim, depressing and frighteningly all-too-real look at the frantic world of gun-running in its heyday - the last 30 years. Hell, it's even hard-hitting enough to have been officially endorsed by Amnesty International. It's a film about a man in a crisis putting the world through a crisis as a result, and there's no Inconvenient Truth-type window to deny the propaganda or give our own views on the subject this time around - we all know the way the world works. We have proof.

Based on a mix of gun-running 'royalty' and infamy, our anti-hero, Nicolas Cage's super-smooth-yet-hoplessly-neurotic Yuri Orlov is a hard one to identify with. With Ethan Hawke's Jack Valentine, an INTERPOL agent, pitted against him, the characters all blur into one big mess. The good guy is a dick, the bad guy is a dick, they're both pumping propaganda from different sides of the US government but the good guy is actually the bad guy and vice-versa, and whichever of the guys we're actually supposed to like is still a dick. The characters are thorough, well-formed and satisfying like any Niccol script, even the ones who are almost entirely unnecessary. Ian Holm, for instance, plays Simeon Weisz, a patronising veteran arms dealer bent on selling arms to one of Yuri's clients' enemies, and yet he weaves in and out of the film at will, and his name, in the end, barely merits mentioning in the plot synopsis at all. Vitaly, Yuri's brother, played by Jared Leto, is another one. Vitaly is also Yuri's former fucked-up cokehead business partner who continuously scrounges off Yuri and brings prostitutes to Christmas as he falls in and out of rehab, and overall he adds an overly-personal touch that a film of this political magnitude simply doesn't need and shouldn't have. Of course, I will admit that the moment in which they both stand over a village of Liberian civilians from a hilltop and Vitaly suddenly realises his brother is selling the guns which will lead to their massacre, is an important one, and a very worthwhile point amongst many that the film makes.

Let's also get this straight - this film is no comedy. There's only so black a film can be before it stops being funny. It's got ounces of wit, style and eloquent panache, but it's a drama to its very core. It's brutally violent at times, horrifyingly real, and most importantly, Niccol realises that this is not a subject you can be light-hearted with. It's true, there is a supposedly illegal arms trade between nations that would break every UN treaty in the book, and yes, there really are millions of innocent people buried under warzone soil because of it. Men, women and children. One cannot joke about it. Yuri has a certain charm about him that is sometimes quite clumsily amusing, but he's put to the sword on more than one occasion for his actions against humanity. A small wounded girl approaches him and asks him if her arm will grow back. When he gains brutal Liberian dictator Andre Baptiste Sr. (based on Charles Taylor) as a client, he also makes a friend whose views on the gun trade hugely differ from his. Baptiste shoots his bodyguards if they're not concentrating. He forces Yuri to kill people with the same gun he purchased from the salesman. He glorifies weaponry. There is no humour here.

From the slow dissolution of his marriage to the end of the Cold War to Yuri being so protective of his business that he'll even put the pin back in an active grenade rather than discard it, the film covers every detail of every base imaginable. It can often be a rocky ride, sometimes too much information is divulged, sometimes too little, and sometimes the films strays into material that is wholly irrelevant, which, in the end, leads to the film's penultimate conclusion. Yuri sells guns, guns kill people, but sometimes the government's actions are also less than commendable, and they'll need any help they can get to keep the world right where they want it. Selling arms to the Afghans to keep the communist Soviets at bay, thundering into Vietnam to stop the onrushing northern enemies - the list goes on, and in the end, while the film has a lot to say, it comes to only one conclusion; the arms trade will continue. During a discussion with Baptiste, Yuri says "I prefer people to fire my guns and miss. Just as long as they are firing". Rather than underline the film with a sharp full stop, the line pre-empts the dour, wry and achingly, achingly sad ending to the film; Yuri bribing two guards in yet another nameless Sarahan warzone to let a convoy of trucks filled with 'sun umbrellas' pass over the border.

"You know who is going to inherit the earth?

Arms dealers, because everyone else is too busy killing each other.

That is the secret to survival.

Never go to war.

Especially with yourself.".