Lord of War
Written and Directed by: Andrew Niccol
Starring: Nicholas Cage
Rated: R for strong violence, drug use, language and sexuality.
Parental Notes: This is not a film for children. Older teens who can handle the realistic violence and sexuality may find it interesting, and it would certainly serve as a good conversation starter for a discussion about international arms trafficking.
“Lord of War” is a character study which flirts with both satire and horror. It paints a bleak picture of international arms trade, blending actual events with fictional characters to create a deeply disturbing, fascinating morality play. Yuri Orlov (Nicholas Cage) is a dangerous man, an ethical black hole, and an unnervingly sympathetic character. Is it funny? Yes, but often because if you don’t treat it as funny it will make you weep in horror that the world not only lets men like this exist but helps them get away with enabling murder.
The film traces Yuri’s life from his beginnings as a small-time gun salesman to his establishment as one of the heavy hitters in the world of freelance arms dealing. His parents moved from the Ukraine to Brooklyn, New York, where Yuri and his kid brother Vitaly grew up. Yuri discovers that he is a natural salesman and that the margins in gun running are impressive, and recruits Vitaly to be his partner. After all, he needs someone he can trust to watch his back. They move up quickly, maybe too quickly. Vitaly develops a cocaine habit and goes into rehab, leaving Yuri alone to handle his ex-Russian-army contacts, dangerous warlords, dedicated Interpol agent Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke), and perhaps most dangerous of all, the competition, old-school gun runner Simeon Weisz (Ian Holm).
Like some of Niccol’s other films, “Gattaca” and “The Truman Show, specifically, “Lord of War” cuts a little too close to reality to be a satire. Although Yuri and his family are fictional, the events in the film are based on reality, and anyone who pays attention to the news out of Africa knows that the misery, poverty, and bestial cruelty the film shows are if anything tamer than they could have been.
Niccol’s other films give us optimistic endings, more or less; their protagonists achieve their dreams, beat the system, and escape injustice. The closing shot of “Lord of War” gives us a street filled with shell casings and some text about who the top arms dealers in the world really are. It’s bleak, it’s frightening, and most of all it’s disturbing how easy it is to like Yuri even when he’s selling the weapons he knows will be used to kill an encampment of helpless women and children.
Cage plays Yuri with his characteristic empty charm. It’s not that Cage is a particularly bad actor, it’s that he doesn’t have much range. But then, neither does Yuri. The man has a vestigial soul at best, and Cage’s smirking lack of depth fits the character perfectly. Yuri is reptilian, and although it seems that the immorality of his profession does get to him from time to time, he fights his moments of humanity down because, as he puts it, a gun runner should never be at war, especially with himself. It’s not that he loves selling guns, it’s that he’s good at it, and he likes what he gets with all that money he earns: a beautiful wife, a gorgeous home, a fleet of his own airplanes, and the rest of it. But most of all, he likes doing something he is good at.
“Lord of War” has its moments of humor, to be sure — especially in the creative ways Yuri avoids Valentine’s efforts to catch him doing something illegal — but overall it is incredibly dark. It’s not a feel-good film. It’s a fascinating, frightening look at a man who has almost no morals, and it makes you think about what kind of a world we must live in for there to be so many men like him out there. Yuri himself puts it best: They say that “evil prevails when good men fail to act”. It should be “evil prevails.”