CNS Movie Review: Lord of War

Lord of War

By David DiCerto
Catholic News Service

NEW YORK (CNS) -- In "Lord of War" (Lions Gate), director Andrew Niccol takes aim at the international arms trade by showing how the hands with the most blood on them are often not the ones pulling the trigger.

By turns morality play, character study, action drama and black comedy (no genre completely successful), the movie starts off with a bang -- literally -- but misses the target.

Nicolas Cage stars as Yuri Orlov, a Ukrainian emigre whose family posed as Jews to escape Soviet oppression and settled in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, N.Y., where they opened a kosher restaurant.

Yuri's unfulfilled life changes suddenly when -- witnessing an attempted Russian mob hit -- he decides to become an illegal arms dealer, setting his sights on where the real money is: wars (rather than small-time street sales).

The amoral Yuri doesn't see the black-and-white dichotomy of right and wrong. From his free market perspective, it's simple supply and demand, no questions asked, no sides taken and no judgments passed.

He recruits his younger brother, Vitali (Jared Leto), whose conflicted conscience contributes to his descent into cocaine addiction.

Through a combination of moxie and salesmanship, Yuri quickly climbs the gunrunning ranks. Before long, he is supplying weapons to some of the world's most ruthless dictators. (How Yuri exactly makes the leap from peddling firearms out of a motel room to hobnobbing with warlords is left a bit sketchy.)

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, his uncle, Dmitri (Eugene Lazarev), a Ukrainian army general, helps Yuri turn the former satellite's enormous stockpile of military hardware -- gathering dust since the Cold War thawed -- into a lucrative one-stop shop for assorted terrorists and Third World butchers.

Among his regular customers is war-torn Liberia's sadistic self-declared president Andre Baptiste Sr. (Eamonn Walker).

In between globe-trotting trips to deadly war zones, he maintains a facade of respectability, having married his trophy wife, Ava (Bridget Moynahan), who remains blissfully, though implausibly, ignorant of her husband's shadowy dealings.

While Yuri can easily stay one step ahead of the law (Ethan Hawke's pursuing Interpol agent) and his rivals (Ian Holm's old-school arms dealer), he can't escape his own conscience.

Histrionics in check, Cage manages to make his despicable character more sympathetic than he deserves to be.

Yuri's equivocations about "the legality" of an act, as opposed to its morality, resonate beyond arms dealing per se to wider debates over social justice, human rights and life issues.

The satiric film's serious social commentary and anti-violence themes are saddled at times with message-heavy melodrama (intent to humanize Yuri) and standard action cliches that bog down the otherwise sharp narrative.

The movie's most powerful visual is an opening credit sequence that traces a bullet's journey from a factory to an African war zone and ultimately to its tragic final target: the forehead of a child soldier. With economy and brutal clarity, the image argues the film's point far more effectively than the remaining two hours.

"Lord of War" raises provocative questions about the effect of illegal arms sales on the wider problem of global violence. It also spotlights the complicity of developed nations -- specifically, the United States -- in the proliferation of weapons in Third World hotspots, which was lamented by the U.S. bishops' 1995 pastoral reflection, "Sowing Weapons of War." In it the bishops wrote, "As a nation we should seek to market our ideals, not our weapons."

The film contains strong images of violence, sexual situations with partial nudity, recurring drug content, some racial stereotyping, and pervasive rough and crude language. The USCCB Office for Film & Broadcasting classification is L -- limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling. The Motion Picture Association of America rating is R -- restricted.

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DiCerto is on the staff of the Office for Film & Broadcasting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

END

Copyright (c) 2005 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
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