"Lord of War"

In this breezy geopolitical satire, Nicolas Cage plays an old-fashioned American salesman -- of Uzis and AK-47s.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Sep 16, 2005 | If only more modern romantic comedies showed as light a touch as Andrew Niccol's "Lord of War" does -- particularly since "Lord of War" isn't a romantic comedy at all, but a geopolitical satire about a nice Ukrainian boy from Brooklyn, N.Y., Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage), who builds an outrageously successful gunrunning business from the ground up.

Niccol, who also wrote the script, is straightforward about his motives here: This is a movie about a guy who shuffles billions of dollars' worth of military weapons from here to there, outfitting any army or warlord who'll pay him, regardless of how, or against whom, those weapons will be used. ("I sold to every army but the Salvation Army," Yuri explains in the voice-over narration that encompasses the movie like a geodesic dome, although he makes it clear he never sold to Osama bin Laden -- "not on any moral grounds. Back then he was always bouncing checks.")

"Lord of War" includes sequences in which children are gunned down by firing squads (much of the violence is off-screen, but Niccol always makes clear what's happening) and a few instances of smiling, unself-conscious third-world kids waving stumps around where their arms should be. And even though Niccol sometimes puts unnecessary homilies in the mouths of his characters, he mostly pulls off the tricky feat of being direct and breezy at the same time. "Lord of War" skims along like a dance routine. Political morality doesn't usually get such fleet choreography in the movies.

Niccol opens the movie by showing us a carpet of spent bullet casings (it looks like an abstract bronze collage of remarkable beauty), and follows up with a cheery step-by-step tutorial on the life of a bullet, tracing its journey from assembly line to consumer -- and then victim. It's the sort of opening that jolts you into a state of attentive curiosity even as it sets off warning bells; it's an artful and arch opening, but it could also be the mark of a movie that's too cool, slick and clever for its own good.

So Niccol shifts gears quickly, sending us back to '80s Brooklyn, as Yuri explains in voice-over how he launched his career. He was born in Ukraine, but his parents fled to America when he and his brother, Vitaly (Jared Leto), were just kids. Mr. and Mrs. Orlov open a kosher restaurant in Brighton Beach, posing as Jews even though they're really Roman Catholic: "I like it," Yuri's father says by way of explanation, just before he waves off the plate of clams his wife is trying to get him to eat. "I like the hat." But Yuri knows the restaurant life isn't for him, not least because Vitaly, the cook, makes a lousy pot of borscht. And after seeing a shootout between local Russian mobsters, inspiration strikes: He asks his dad if he can attend services with him the following Saturday, and there, outside the synagogue, he makes the business contact that will net him his first Uzi for resale. (It folds up quite nicely into an '80s camcorder case the size of a giant lunchbox.)

From there, Yuri expands the business, luring Vitaly into it, too, although he quickly learns that his ruminative, softhearted kid brother doesn't have the guts for it. He builds his client base gradually, starting with the locals and moving into the Middle East and Africa, where he gets on the good side of blood-crazed Liberian dictator Andre Baptiste (a thinly disguised version of Charles Taylor, played with snakelike elegance by the wonderful actor Eamonn Walker). Without even blinking, Yuri supplies the necessary munitions for the massacre of innocents -- or of anyone, really. The recurring sick joke of the movie is that Yuri never lets his conscience get in the way, even though, as Cage plays him, we know he has one. We're not getting the autopilot Cage here, but the Cage who actually has a sense of the movie around him. As Cage plays him, Yuri is just a high-toned traveling salesman, charismatic, reprehensible and often exhausted. When Yuri is confronted by someone close to him who has only recently learned what he does for a living, he offers the plaintive defense: "It's not about the money. I'm good at it." And the twisted thing is, he's right.

Next Page: Yuri sings the praises of the AK-47: "It's so easy, even a child can use it -- and they do!"

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