In a movie that co-stars the shapely Bridget Moynahan and Tiger Beat mainstay Jared Leto, you wouldn't expect the sexiest thing onscreen to be an AK-47 assault rifle. Such, though, is the case in Lord of War, the new film that wants to educate you about the horrors of international arms dealing while at the same time celebrating its sex appeal.
Nicholas Cage plays Yuri Orlov, the discontented son of Ukranian immigrants living in Brooklyn. The entrepreneurial Orlov figures that selling guns to his gang-infested neighborhood might be his only ticket out of the place. Orlov develops a talent and a taste for the trade, and soon he is cutting deals with a Who's Who list of the worlds' leading terrorists, despots and warlords. Orlov claims, however, that he doesn't do business with Osama bin Laden -- not because of any moral hang-ups but simply because bin Laden tends to bounce checks.
The bin Laden gag is typical of the film's unrepentant sense of humor. Its first hour has a light, comic tone that serves as an acute counterpoint to its dark subject matter. Warlord Andre Baptise -- a character apparently based on mass-murderous Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor -- is a particular crowd-pleaser. For the most part, however, the jokes cause more seat-shifting than laughter, and the first half of the movie stumbles from scene to scene without any discernable direction or conflict.
It is only after Orlov begins his inevitable downfall that Lord of War compels its audience to buy in. The movie's most affecting and poetic sequence comes when Orlov, high on "brown brown," a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder, descends into the war-wasted streets of Liberia's capital and comes face to face with the violence he has made possible. At this moment, the tone shifts, and the movie begins to acknowledge the gravity of its subject matter. The halfhearted farce that is the movie's first half is succeeded by an earnest, if unoriginal drama (borrowing liberally from The Godfather series) in which Orlov's personal and professional lives tragically collide.
The damage, however, may have already been done. In another memorable scene, Orlov spends an erotically charged moment alone with an AK-47. As Orlov sings its praises in voice-over, the camera pulls in close and watches the well-polished weapon turn over and over, admiring its deadly anatomy. It looks much like a conventional Hollywood love scene. In a sense, this moment sums up Lord of War, a film that gets off on gun-running -- seemingly despite its better judgment.
The movie concludes with a kind of public service announcement, declaring that its events are based on real events and that the world's largest arms dealers are in fact world powers such as the United States, Britain and Russia. The filmmakers' desire to educate its audience is admirable but a bit surprising. How are we supposed to reconcile the film's condemnation of real-world arms dealing with its eroticized gun-worship?
We all know that big studio movies are produced not because they have something to say, but rather because they have something to sell. For Lord of War, like its anti-hero Orlov, that something is guns. And while nobody gets his politics from Hollywood, it is where much of the Western world gets its tastes -- which means that, in the end, Lord of War may create more Orlovs than it brings down.
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