Lord of War

This is finally a good review. Someone i work with who is deeper in the arms industry said that it made him question what he does. I suspect that this is a tad of an exageration, and a case of getting caught up in the fiction. Nevertheless, worth watching.

Enjoy!

Lord of War

Yuri (Nicolas Cage) is an arms dealer. The film opens as we watch him getting into the business when he realizes that the nature of guns and man means that the arms trade will supply him with a captive and constant market comparable to the food industry. He goes into the arms business and drags his younger brother (Jared Leto) into it with him as his “brother in arms.” The two brothers take the arms world by storm and along the way Leto picks up various drug addictions, Cage a model wife, and all the while Cage gradually loses his soul.

The biggest flaw in the film is that it has a very preachy element to it. We watch as Cage buys former Soviet weaponry and then resells it on to whoever wants it: West African despots, Middle Eastern tribesmen, etc. – in a rather cheap throw away line he claims to have never sold Al Qaeda because “back then their checks used to bounce.” We listen as he provides a voiceover that describes what he is doing in an absent fashion. We hear no remorse in this voice for what he is doing, and we do not seeing him intervening when he could try to save people from the misery he is selling to their oppressors.

This is, of course, a cinematic effect employed to great effect by the director and screenwriter intended to emphasize the misery and emptiness of the world that Cage inhabits. Yet, by doing it in this fashion it becomes somewhat grating as it distances us constantly from any of the characters. The main failing of the film is that none of the characters seem very real. The only real characters (maybe intentionally) are the ones who are left dead by arms that Cage deals in; they silently attest to the filmmaker’s message.

This is a shame, as overall the film is intelligent and has an amusing flair to it. The juicy ironies thrown up by the arms trade are dealt with sometimes in a rather too pious fashion, and so rather than mordant sarcasm, we are left with are generalized accusations against the abstract arms trade rather than the individuals who are ultimately responsible for using or trading the weapons of misery. You can walk away from the film feeling that Cage is merely feeding a supply that we will always need, and until we all decide to stand up to guns, then people like him will continue to get fat and rich off misery.

The system may be flawed, but one cannot forgive those who profit off it.

Anyway, this is now becoming a rather pious piece itself. Overall, the acting is good, if a little detached. Ian Holm’s character seems completely unnecessary, except maybe the symbolism of the new violently taking over the old embodied when he dies (see, I carefully didn’t give the plot away). The wife is never really explained as a person, and Leto’s character seems to simply be there to act as Cage’s drugged conscience. One person I have yet to mention is Ethan Hawke who appears as a cop in pursuit of Cage, he is the one moral voice in the film, and his ineffectiveness galls those who may think that salvation is somehow possible. At the same time, I suppose that the character’s morality gives us some hope. Kind of unnecessary, as the film is already steeped in the director’s sense of morality.

Cage himself is good in his part (though no Oscars on the horizon for anyone in this film) and is able to walk through the motions of character that is not really intended to be a complete person.

Survey says: pretty good. However, could have done with a little less morality and maybe a little more reality.