Lord of War (2005)

I went into Lord of War expecting not to like it. Even as the FBI warning flashed across my screen, I settled into the couch and thought, "This is gonna be bad." I was expecting a cheesy accent, over-the-top emoting, and a film that generally deserved a better star.

Fortunately, I was mostly wrong. Lord of War is, in spite of my preconceived notions, enjoyable, and even Cage himself is pretty good here.

Narrated by its protagonist, Lord of War is a demi-biopic of arms dealer Yuri Orlov (Cage), who finds himself adapting to a new geopolitical climate after the fall of the Soviet Union. With his brother Vitaly (Jared "Paul Allen" Leto) as his partner, Orlov grapples with competing arms dealer Simeon Weisz (a smarmy Ian Holm), allies himself with Liberian dictator Andre Baptiste (Eammon Walker), and woos the girl of his dreams, model Ava Fontaine (Bridget Moynahan) - all while doding Interpol and its persistent agent Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke). The film is a standard rise-and-fall story, with a moralistic twist at the end that turns it into a little something more.

I have a love-hate relationship with Nicolas Cage's films. Early Nic Cage - Raising Arizona, for example, and Honeymoon in Vegas - demonstrated a flair for comedic timing while playing offbeat characters with quirky and well-played mannerisms. A funny thing happened on the way to the modern day, and somewhere Nic's career fell to splinters, culminating in what I affectionately call the "Trilogy of Terrible" - Ghost Rider, Next, and The Wicker Man (my personal favorite "bad movie"). Recently, though, he seems to be on a bit of an upswing; the National Treasure franchise won't win any Oscars, but they're at least watchable, and I thought Cage was fantastic as Big Daddy in Kick-Ass. Lord of War brings Cage another step closer on the path to redemption, though he has a long way to go if I'm to forget the (in)famous line "How'd it get burned?!"

The rest of the cast is, for the most part, interchangeable. No actor or actress leaves a truly indelible mark on the film such that the roles couldn't be played by anyone else; as pursuing Interpol agent Jack Valentine, Hawke is fine, but any other actor could have done one step better (I'm thinking of Denzel Washington, but I don't know why). As Ava, Moynahan often bemoans her status as just another pretty face in this film, but I'm wondering if there's a bit of metafictional irony behind that, since any other "pretty" actress could have been just as good here. The only exception, as always, is Ian Holm, who does a fantastic job embodying arms dealer Simeon, once the top in his field and now struggling to retain his position - but I would have liked to see more of him in here, since his appearances are delightful but few and far between.

Though I'm labeling this as a "good" film and "to my liking," I should go on record as saying that the movie falls apart once it runs into the stereotypical "arms dealing is bad" moralism that ends the film. What began as an entertaining flick with a conscience turns into a conscience with moving pictures; suddenly the audience is preached at, with heavyhanded talk of "necessary evils" and closing title cards that indict members of the U.S. government and the UN Security Council for being worse arms dealers than Yuri Orlov. Huh? I don't know what it is about me, but I'm running into problems with films that start as one thing and end as another without successfully transitioning between the two.

Consequently, the film - and Cage - seems to run out of steam by the end. Cage seems tired, the plot careens into a highly politicized direction, and the film ends with none of the joy that it bore in the first 90 minutes. Perhaps that's the point; gunrunning is a joyless occupation. All right, but the film changes its focus to attempt to highlight the international gunrunning scene when we've previously focused only on Yuri; this switch is sudden and virtually ineffective, leaving only a jarring sense and the feeling that we're watching a different movie than the one we started with.

Lord of War bears an R rating "for strong violence, drug use, language, and sexuality." The violence is particularly graphic here, and the language is pretty strong. Drug use is limited to a few scenes surrounding cocaine, and sexuality includes fleeting moments of nudity as well as a pronounced presence of adultery and prostitution.