The opening credits of “Lord of War” are lovely and disturbing. The camera follows a bullet, one among thousands, as it's manufactured, packed, shipped, loaded into a gun and delivered into the forehead of an adolescent boy in an African country. And so begins an ambitious new film by Andrew Niccol that delves into the world of illegal arms dealing. Nicholas Cage is the unlikely anti-hero, Yuri Orlov, a Ukrainian American from Brighton Beach, who narrates the film with an ironic detachment that borders on the absurd.
We watch him take on the world of gun-selling, con a beautiful model into marrying him, nurse his younger brother out of drug addiction, form an unlikely friendship with a cruel Liberian dictator, elude the Interpol agents who are following him and make an obscene amount of money in the process.
If this seems like a lot to pack into a two-hour movie, it is. The film, which holds so much promise in the first 20 or so minutes, never actually tells a story or delivers a message, although it’s painfully obvious that the filmmakers want to throw our beliefs into question. Cage coolly explains his life’s work throughout the film with lines like, “The first time you sell a gun is a lot like the first time you have sex.” Luckily Nick Cage’s innate charm can pull off predictable schlock like this for at least a little while.With dialogue this superficial, however, he can’t make us invest in any of the characters or even take sides any of the overall geopolitical question that “Lord of War” hopes to raise.
How Cage’s Orlov got involved in illegal arms dealing in the early 1980s is unclear, and what makes him so good at it is even more befuddling. With his Southern California drawl and easy going manner (picture the Dude in an Armani suit), he is delicious onscreen but hardly believable as an international criminal. He tells us he has a knack for languages but can’t muster enough energy to pronounce his brother’s name Vitali with a single hard Russian consonant.
Vitali is played by Jared Leto, in his second turn as a first generation Brighton Beach drug addict after “Requiem for a Dream.” They begin in the business together, putting together small-time deals, but after getting paid in cocaine, Vitali promptly looses his mind and is deposited into rehab by his big brother.
Yuri continues on with his work, conning hometown model, a dull Bridget Moynahan, into marrying him. Things really take off for Yuri, but alas not for the film, when the Soviet Union is dissolved and he has the brilliant (and again completely unexplained) foresight to know the chaotic country will be a smugglers paradise. With the help of an uncle in the Soviet army, he enters the big time, arranging shipments of guns, tanks and whatever else to ruthless heads of state.
Eamonn Walker plays Andre Baptiste Sr., the president of Liberia and Yuri’s best client. This is by far the most interesting relationship of the film, even though Ethan Hawke, as an Interpol agent, has second billing in another negligible periphery plot.
The most compelling part of “Lord of War” is Niccol’s exploration of the economics and morality of arms dealing, and state-sponsored civil wars. It is a courageous attempt to tackle a complex political issue. But Niccols never gets much farther than Cage grasping a handful of diamonds and looking sheepishly on as one of his products is unwrapped and used to kill an unsuspecting guard.
Throughout the film are nuggets of cinematic brilliance. Niccol, who also directed “Gattica,” dives in to the deep water in both content and form, succeeding only in the latter. A plane is emptied of its loot and stripped for parts to a shell in the African desert in a time lapse photography sequence that alone might make the movie worth watching.
In fact all the scenes in Africa are beautiful and disturbing in their gauzy yellow light, but there is no human factor to hold it all together. Yuri’s relationships with his parents, who disown him, his brother, whose tragic demise borders on the ridiculous and his trophy wife are all tantalizing but utterly neglected. Instead of character development, Niccol relies on pithy one-liners that can’t support all that he wants to say.
Ultimately “Lord of War” is two hours of movie trailer in search of a film But it’s such a good movie trailer that one wishes the whole crew would all go back to Africa and give it a second try.