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Friday, September 16, 2005
'Lord of War' is a breathtaking tour of the gun running world
In the upsetting but riveting military drama "Lord of War," Nicolas Cage plays Yuri Orlov, a resourceful, cheerfully immoral gunrunner and arms dealer to an endless succession of Third World conflagrations during the past 25 years.
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View all photosA second-generation Ukrainian American whose hard-working parents operate a restaurant in the Little Odessa section of Brooklyn, Yuri gets his feet wet in the gun biz by selling an Uzi to one of the local members of the Russian Mafia in 1980.
After that, it's a Horatio Alger rise through the decade as Yuri moves around Africa, Eastern Europe and the Middle East supplying weapons to whomever can pay his price -- narrated every scene of the way by Cage in a torrent of dry, ironic cynicism.
The character's big break comes with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989, when his family background and language skills put him in position to broker the arsenal of communism to the ethnic feuds of the developing world -- and make zillions in the process.
As his chronicle unfolds, the movie's strength and weakness is that it doesn't try to make Yuri sympathetic or glamorous. The steely lack of compromise is artistically laudable, but poses a challenge to an audience who has to spend two hours in the company of a detestable creep.
Director-writer Andrew Niccol ("Gattaca") also can't wring much interest out of subplots involving Yuri's clueless trophy wife (Bridget Moynahan), his weak-willed younger brother (Jared Leto) and an Interpol nemesis (Ethan Hawke). All are gangster-movie stereotypes.
But the movie soars as docudrama. Niccol's model seems to have been Scorsese's "GoodFellas" and, like that film, the blitzkrieg of images and rapid-fire narration takes us on a breathtaking inside tour of a scary world. It's an extraordinary expose.
Visually, "Lord of War" is also something special. From its opening sequence following the life of a bullet from factory to impact in a child-soldier, the camerawork is innovative, the art direction is grimly spectacular and the scale genuinely epic.
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