Lord of War

One type of shot composes about 80% of the entire film Lord of War. We zoom in on star Nicholas Cage standing in the sunlight, in a familiar black cloak, wearing sunglasses and holding a briefcase. On the soundtrack, Cage, as Ukranian immigrant and international arms dealer Yuri Orlov, informs us about some random aspect of the gunrunning trade.

This includes the film's opening, in which we pan across a bullet-covered battlefield to discover Cage, briefcase in hand, who wants to tell us all about his adventures selling weapons in Africa. I have no idea why writer/director Andrew Niccol is so enamored of this shot. It's dull, really, and the film's endless voice-over gets tiresome immediately. I'm generally against voice-over in the first place, except in film noir, because just hearing someone talk off-camera isn't very compelling on its own. Sure, if the writing is really great, and a character has a terrific voice and idiosyncratic manner of speakign (like, say, Robert Downey Jr. in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang), then exceptions can be made.

But Lord of War goes way overboard. There's barely any dialogue at all for the film's first hour. Just shots of Cage in various locales around the world, smoking and trying to look cool while explaining stuff in dry monotone on the soundtrack. Wake me when it's through.



You may pick up some stray bits of information from all that narration - maybe some insight into how an arms dealer might go about bribing a foreign official - but it's not enough to elevate this well-worn material. Though I can't think of another film specifically about the inside of the international arms trade, Lord of War contents itself to follow the tired old "rise-and-fall-of-a-crime-lord" storyline.

Like Blow and last year's DVD smash Layer Cake, Niccol's film wants to give us the ultimate insider's view on a very illegal black-market industry. Unfortunately, like those films, it falls back on convention, it stretches believability and it yearns for a kind of cynical hipness when it should be vying for relevance. I have to say, out of all three movies, Lord of War fails in the grandest way - it's the film that strains the most for credibility, and comes up the shortest.

At the outset, Yuri is just some punk kid living with his parents in Little Odessa. (Though he explains, again in voice-over, that he immigrated to America from the Ukraine as a little boy, Cage doesn't ever even try to convince us he's Russian...He's just playing Nicholas Cage.) He and his unpredictable, naive brother Vitaly (Jared Leto) go into the arms business, seemingly for a lack of anything better to do.

In a ludicrously dumb sub-plot, Yuri's dad faked being a Jew to escape the Soviet Union, but has now embraced the religion. In yet another voice-over, Yuri explains that he buys his first wholesale weapon - an Uzi from Israel - through a connection he meets at his dad's temple.

I'll stop here for a moment...Wouldn't that be an interesting scene to actually watch in the movie? A guy goes to temple with his dad and tries to make a connection with the Israeli guy to buy illegal weapons! Why just narrate that scene..."I made a connection and bought an Uzi." Who gives a shit? Show me something interesting, goddammit!

All the usual, expected "rise-and-fall" material comes in due time. Vitaly develops a coke problem, and Yuri has to drop him from the business, causing bad blood between the brothers. Yuri, who at first distances himself from any actual violence, merely selling the guns and leaving, descends deeper and deeper into a web of total, unabashed villainy. An overzealous ATF agent who can't be bribed (Ethan Hawke, who gets in very little actual dialogue amidst all the voice-over) tails him wherever he goes (including via helicopter, in a scene shamelessly lifted from Goodfellas). Yuri's wife, a model about whom he has obsessed since his youth (Bridget Moynahan), initially swoons for his wealth and priviledge, but comes to resent his secrecy and frequent absence.

Yawn.

A more promising plotline concerns the cruel, psychopathic dictator of Liberia (Eamonn Walker, in the film's only interesting performance), who seems to me to be based on General Idi Amin Dada, as presented in Barbet Schroeder's documentary of the same name. He's an interesting character, a man of contradictions in a movie filled with one-note types, but we spend far too little time with him, and the film as a whole seems less concerned with actually telling a story about Africa than listening to the dulcet tone's of Nic Cage's speaking voice.

Like a lot of other "serious" 2005 issue movies - and I include Syriana, The Constant Gardener and Crash here - Lord of War overshoots its target by a good stretch. By the end of his film, Niccol tries to make a case against the U.S., stating that the President is the world's largest arms dealer, and that he's dependant on guys like Yuri Orlov plying their trade around the world. Well, that may be true, but it's a random, cheap shot at the end of a movie that has nothing to do with the United States selling arms around the world. This is a simple story about one man, like The Constant Gardener, that pretends in its final 15 minutes to have some kind of larger significance and application.

What finally holds Lord of War back, along with the constant voice-overs and a general air of tongue-in-cheek jokiness that really mars the film's more serious sections, is its cartoonish lack of believability. A gritty insider's view at how arms trading works should at least try to get its protagonist out of scrapes with the law in a somewhat plausible manner. Yuri's constant outsmarting of the ATF takes on a Roadrunner-esque quality after a while.

When the agents have him with a boat full of weapons, he quickly has a sailor repaint the ship's name while the ATF boats approach the vessel. Later, when the ATF has Yuri stuck with an abandoned plane loaded with illegal firearms in the middle of the African desert, he gives them away to passing travelers, whose numbers increase exponentially during the 10 minutes before the caravan arrives to arrest him. Is this supposed to be a taut thriller granting you access behind-the-scenes to how arms deals work, or the latest issue of Spy vs. Spy?