Review: Lord Of War

Stanley Kubrick would have been proud. Kiwi writer Andrew Niccol, who has repeatedly shown his consummate skill penning such thoughtful "what-ifs" as Gattaca, The Truman Show and Simøne, has fashioned his own private Dr. Strangelove in Lord Of War, his biting and complex anti-war missive. It stars Nicolas Cage as Yuri Orlov, an international arms dealer who goes from rags to riches -- à la coke dealer George Jung in Blow or Michael Corleone in The Godfather saga -- and almost develops a conscience in the process.

Niccol grabs and pummels us with two giant hands at the very start, detailing bang-bang-bang the life of a bullet, from its manufacture to its destiny as a kill shot. This is where we meet Cage, who is looking over the devastation of a battlefield, as he schools us by telling of the 500 million AK-47's in the world -- 1 for every 12 people. "My job is to sell one to the other 11," he says, speaking of his wares as nonchalantly as he would cell phones or comfortable shoes. In that Niccol cleverly wraps his sermonizing in relentless dark humor here, he does not come of as a blowhard like crusading doc-worker Michael Moore does as of late. He also does not pretend to be uncovering some great latent evil in the world, as he shows through Cage's shrewd and storied character that he is no deluded idealist who thinks that war and the greed that drives it are likely to become relics any time soon just because some of us will them so. With every burst of fire from his poison pen, Niccol shifts gears from his usual speculative fare (and with great conviction), giving his fact-based subject heft, grit and the kind of fly-on-the-wall perspective that Steven Soderbergh nailed in 2000's Traffic.

Cage is pretty dynamic here, shunning his often one-note bravado so that he might match Niccol's targeted gallows wit. For fans of Cage, this is a relief, as it relegates his incredibly lazy turn in the 2004 action craptacular, National Treasure, to fluke status conceived to subsidize his warehouse of very expensive Oscar polish (though a sequel and...gulp...a Ghost Rider adaptation are both on the way.) Jared Leto, as Cage's younger brother and reluctant bodyguard, Vitaly, is a bit underused, though it takes a lot to match Cage when he's so locked into a character like he is here. Bridget Moynahan is not, though, as she appears on-screen just enough to be adequately perceived as the trophy wife she is. Ian Holm, as the principled and well-mannered rival dealer Simeon Weisz, is a good foil, as are Niccol's Gattaca star, Ethan Hawke, here as hands-tied ATF cat to Cage's resourceful mouse, and Oz staple Eamonn Walker as an eloquent Third World tyrant and customer.

There is so much conflict going on here, and not just the ones perpetuated by all the violence a-flarin' and the bullets a-loadin', either. Yuri constantly struggles to break out of the lie that brought his family to his beloved Land of Lies and make something real and "honest" for himself (they pretended to be Jews so they could emigrate from the Ukraine). His brother Vitaly is a slave to his drug addiction. Yuri scrambles to keep up appearances, all the while attempting to maintain a ruse of legitimacy to keep one step ahead of the feds (one ancillary lesson that can be gleaned from all this being "Lying is a lot of work.") Niccol exercises some restraint in expanding on these as soon as he has made it clear that if he did, it would be great (and the movie would be five hours long.)

The only real issue I took with Lord Of War is that there was almost too much in it for one film. Every damning diatribe could become a tangential riff of its own, everything from the un-winnable "War On Drugs" to the implied global slave trade to the current battle that all this serves as prologue to -- "The War On Terror". Perhaps the DVD will have a "Pop-Up Video" feature. Other than that, though, it was thoughtful, hyperkinetic and most importantly, entertaining.

The biggest gamble that Niccol takes here is with the development of Cage's character. I mentioned earlier that his character almost develops a conscience -- almost. It is when we realize that he has not quite made that full arc from naïve Russian immigrant to guilt-plagued gunrunner whose anguished reckoning with self sparked a change in his wicked ways that Niccol reveals his plan to us; Yuri is not the main character: we are. When Yuri gets caught during what would otherwise have been the pivotal event in the third act, Niccol pulls this brilliant slight-of-hand. It is uncharacteristically subtle, too, especially that because for the previous two hours, he has come at us with both barrels blazing (forgive the obvious allusion). No, this is not an 11th-hour "Verbal Kint is Keyser Söze" denouement, but the kind that blindsides you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday (and perhaps after watching it for a second time.) After all, Yuri has been talking to us for the duration of the film, breaking that Fourth Wall (with a percussion rocket) and altering our perceptions of our selves and the way we look at the world. In that action, that Big Shift essential to all Good Drama occurs.

Niccol's final fade to black, in which he reveals that the U.S., Russia, France and Germany are the world's biggest mercenary arms dealers, is a fitting groin kick that is both memorable and decisive. It does not seem out-of-place, though, as Holm's seething Weisz has already served as that spoonful of sugar to disable our gag reflex that would have otherwise made us reject Niccol's ruminations as largely fiction. It does not seem like a sermon or a lecture, either, in that we come to the same conclusion ourselves, one that at which the so-logical supercomputer Joshua in WarGames (1983), after (virtually) nuking the world, also arrived at when he spun wise and wistful with, "The only way to win is not to play."