Lord of War

One man demonstrates how to get rich selling warring nations the tools of their deadly trade in this dark comedy drama. Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) is an opportunistic businessman who stumbled into a gold mine after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Huge caches of Soviet weapons became available at bargain prices (and even for free if one wasn't above stealing), and as literally billions of dollars' worth of Soviet military technology disappeared, it began finding its way into the hands of weapons dealers eager to sell it to the highest bidder. Orlov was one such dealer who found plenty of buyers for guns and military gear in unstable Third World nations, who paid cash and didn't appreciate too many questions. Orlov's exploits in the arms business quickly made him a very rich man, but they've also led to some unwanted attention from Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke), an Interpol agent who is convinced Orlov isn't playing by the rules. Inspired by a true story, Lord of War also features Jared Leto, Ian Holm, Bridget Moynahan, and Donald Sutherland.

AMG Review: Lord of War is a really good movie -- if you stop watching after the opening credits. That first sequence is virtuoso, following a bullet (through "bullet's eye view") from the moment of its birth in a factory, to the moment it lodges itself in the forehead of a combatant. The rest of Andrew Niccol's film is an unmitigated disaster. Lord of War wants to remind viewers of Three Kings, fleshing out the hip absurdities of violent conflict, but it suffers from a fatal dearth of cleverness. The film's most obvious sin is that it's so obvious, ranging from on-the-nose song choices (Eric Clapton's "Cocaine" plays during a scene of cocaine use) to easy telegraphs (a character proclaims himself the luckiest man in the world, right before being blown up by a car bomb). As Yuri Orlov, Nicolas Cage is both an unlikable protagonist and a stultifying narrator -- in a classic case of forgetting that film is a visual medium, Niccol forces Cage to drone out shallow explanations throughout. This kind of thing works in Goodfellas, another obvious inspiration for Niccol -- but there, Henry Hill's words were an essential companion piece to sorting out an unknown underground. Gun-running is also unknown, but the penetration into this world is surface level at best, miscalculated at worst, as though Niccol didn't bother to find out how real gun-running actually works. Jared Leto is utterly wasted as Orlov's whiny screw-up brother, a designation he continually repeats for viewers who might have forgotten his plot function. Neither he nor Cage seems the least bit Russian. Ethan Hawke has even less to do as a government agent continually castrated by Orlov's narrow escapes. Lord of War wants to be a rebelliously cool profile of a profane antihero, someone disagreeable like a used car salesman or a tobacco lobbyist. Instead, it's just profane.