Review of Lord of War (2005) by Moviemastereddy — 02 Apr 2016

"Lord of War," a misfire of a political satire about the international gun market, opens with a killer scene: Nicolas Cage standing on a veritable carpet of bullet casings. Mr. Cage's character, Yuri Orlov, is a gunrunner who has placed untold weapons in untold numbers of hands. Now, surrounded by gutted buildings and dressed to impress, a cigarette burning between his fingers, Yuri looks straight into the camera and wonders aloud how he can furnish everyone in the world with a gun to call his very own.

This carpet of casings also serves as a launching pad for a subsequent and even more outlandish opening credit sequence that tracks a bullet from its manufacture in Russia to its final resting place in the skull of a young African. A bullet in the head always seizes the imagination or at least the audience's attention, but because the African is merely cinematic collateral damage, the image registers both as showboating and as a warning shot for the problems to come. The screenwriter for "Lord of War," Andrew Niccol, lavishes a great deal of time and many words building a case against guns; unfortunately, the film's director, who also happens to be Mr. Niccol, enjoys playing with toy guns. His words may say no, but his overworked, overslick visual style says lock and load, baby.

The problem, of course, is that violence is so inherently cinematic, so visually and aurally captivating. Loud pops, big bangs and the sights and sounds of bodies seizing up and spurting blood have long been the stock in trade of certain movies, which partly explains why the bangs are getting ever louder, the bloodletting more spectacular. The noise in these films has grown so deafening that it can be hard to hear the message (if there even is one), especially when that message carries a familiar, been-there, done-that, eat-your-oatmeal-because-it's-good-for-you moralism. Like: guns are bad, corporations are soulless, and some first world governments traffic in third world misery. To which any reasonably informed viewer might be expected to wonder, And your point is what, exactly?

Mr. Niccol's point here, it appears, is both to entertain and to instruct with the story of Yuri, a Russian émigré who rises from humble Brooklyn to become a globe-trotting gunrunner with all the moral reasoning of a flea. Guided by Mr. Cage's intermittent voice-over, the story tracks Yuri's decades-long evolution as a merchant of death saddled with a few familiar distractions: a beautiful model wife played by Bridget Moynahan and a drug-addled brother played by Jared Leto.

Yuri gets his break in the early 1990's when he snaps up materiel in the recently imploded Ukraine that he subsequently offloads in war-ravaged Africa. Like everything else in this film, Mr. Cage's performance is watchable if never credible because his director never resolves the disconnect between this star's function (to entertain) and that of his character (to repel).