Starring: Nicolas Cage, Jared Leto, Ethan Hawke
Director: Andrew Niccol
The film: Andrew Niccol's film about the trials and tribulations of an illicit arms dealer, has the word 'thriller' all over it. Literally, that is, with choice words from reviewers and a hyperbolic blurb that plays up the lead protagonist's evasion of Interpol and the 'deadly liabilities' that threaten to become his downfall.
Such ill-advised words do Lord of War a major disservice. The film is, first and foremost, a satire about the illegal arms trade: the first line from Yuri Orlov, the gun-runner played by Cage, has him addressing the camera amid a war-torn landscape. 'There are 550 million weapons in circulation globally, one for every 12 people on the planet,' he says, before slowly putting a fat cigar into his mouth. 'The question is - how do we arm the other 11?'
The first half unfurls Orlov's emergence as a power in his trade, dictated mostly by his own droll voiceover. He accounts for the epiphany that drove him into his business (a shoot-out at a club he just happened to be at), his lack of scruples that propelled his rise in the trade ('I sell guns to every army but the Salvation Army') and a devastatingly clinical and cynical ode to the 'babies' he's selling. Describing the AK-47, he says 'it's so easy a child can use it. And they do'.
Orlov's success was built on his insistence in not taking sides. Lord of War, ironically, falls apart when Niccol's indictment against his lead character becomes increasingly ambivalent. The film was gripping when Orlov was pictured as a businessman oozing moral indifference - even when he saw how his arms were used by death squads to spray at so-called civilian 'renegades' - and someone armed with enough quick wit to dodge the law. The way he 'transformed' his arms-carrying vessel to evade his persistent pursuer, Ethan Hawke's interpol agent Jack Valentine, is hilarious.