Review from The New Yorker....
Andrew Niccol’s “Lord of War” gets under way with the story of a bullet. The camera takes us inside an armaments factory, where, from the cartridge’s point of view, we see a brass casing filled, sealed, picked up and inspected, thrown back into a pile, and crated. The box is then turned over to a Russian officer and shipped to African thugs, who take the cartridge out of its crate and give it to a fighter, who fires it into the head of an unsuspecting young boy. This sequence—at first nifty, then horrifying—is composed of many separate shots, but the editor, Zach Staenberg, cut the material in such a way that the bullet’s progression feels continuous and inexorable. At the climax, the camera seems to be flying through the air straight at the boy. A malicious wit, this Andrew Niccol: by forcing the audience to take the bullet’s flight, he is suggesting that we are complicit both in arms sales (the United States is a leading exporter) and in eager enjoyment of movie violence, of which this sequence is a startling and admonitory example.
“Lord of War,” the story of the rise of an international arms dealer, is a raffishly ironic and insinuating movie—and probably the most sheerly enjoyable film of the year so far. Its hero, Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage), a fluent and plausible-sounding fellow, was born in Ukraine but grew up in Brighton Beach, among Jews who were mainly either pious or violent. Yuri, however, is neither. He’s not even Jewish. His father posed as a Jew to gain asylum in the United States, and Yuri, playing the angles, uses that identity when it suits him. He’s a con man who fights off depression by trying on roles—he owns passports from at least six different countries. After the bullet scene, Yuri, gazing at the camera, takes us into his confidence in the manner of Shakespeare’s Richard III. He announces that he will not lie to us or try to make himself look good, and it’s a promise that Niccol keeps on his behalf. The picture, which might be subtitled “A Rogue’s Progress,” moves along quickly, with Cage, in a new, booming, man-of-the world voice, narrating and stitching together brief scenes of Yuri’s life as a seller of rifles, machine guns, and grenades to crumbum Third World dictators. The narration is faintly reminiscent of Ray Liotta’s voice-over in Martin Scorsese’s great gangster movie “GoodFellas.” The two men go through similar arcs of precipitous ascent, weird adventure, positive cash flow, high living, abundant white powder, and then trouble. But Cage’s words are jauntier than Liotta’s. His tone is, roughly, “Yes, I’m a bad guy, and my life is a mess, but look at the fun I’m having!” Yuri is the most candid of cynics. In a semi-chastened moment, when he has temporarily withdrawn from arms dealing, he says, “Thank God there are still legal ways to exploit developing countries.” If you’re capable of finding that remark funny as well as vile, then you may be impure enough to enjoy this movie and its scapegrace hero.
Niccol, who was born in New Zealand in 1964, set up shop as a feature director with the sleek, pastel-blue science-fiction fantasia “Gattaca” (1997), which was about a genetically perfect totalitarian future. He then wrote “The Truman Show” (1998), whose hero, a cheerful insurance salesman, slowly realizes that he’s living in a sitcom. Niccol seemed to be some sort of new “conceptual” movie artist, a creator of artificial worlds. In “S1m0ne,” which he wrote and directed in 2002, a movie director loses his leading lady and develops a stunning digital substitute. “Gattaca” was very good sci-fi, but the puckish conceits of the two later movies were so thoroughly worked out that, at times, they left you little to respond to. In “Lord of War,” Niccol has at last begun to embrace the messy world we live in—or, at least, his own hyped-up, viciously entertaining version of it.
Nicolas Cage has been appearing in movies since he was a teen-ager, and he is now forty-one. His face is fuller, and he has almost lost the hangdog woefulness of his youth—almost, but not quite, which turns out to be a good thing. In order to like Yuri, we need to stay in touch with his fear that he’s just a cheap hustler from Brighton Beach after all, and Cage instinctively understands that. Now and then, his voice falters, his drawbridge eyebrows rise, and he allows Yuri’s businessman’s confidence to slip into despair. Yuri quickly recovers, but, by the end of the movie, he has taken part in so many nauseating deals that his soul has faded away. Again and again, Niccol puts him in situations where he has to face the awfulness of what he does. No fewer than three foils are posed against him: his kid brother (Jared Leto), who joins him in the arms trade, but then has misgivings and collapses into druggy hysteria; an older, “moral” arms dealer (Ian Holm), who sells to rebels rather than to dictators; and a straight-arrow Interpol agent (Ethan Hawke), who is obsessed with Yuri but won’t exceed the law in order to destroy him. They are better people than Yuri, and they say scornful things to him that are true, yet, like Richard III, he’s the hero because he’s fully conscious of everything he does, and gives it shape and body in words.
Movie taste has turned very square in this country, and I don’t know if audiences are prepared to accept a (edited) as a hero. “Lord of War” tells you why intelligent people may enjoy doing evil things, and it lets you in on the fun. It has been made without hypocrisy, which is not something I’m sure I would say of the other current movie devoted to Westerners mucking up in Africa—the high-minded but often fuzzy and self-regarding “Constant Gardener,” a film that hurls many vague accusations and leaves one in a teary, dissatisfied funk. “Lord of War” is lower in tone, but it’s also memorable and pleasure-giving, and its sense of outrage is just as strong. The bullet ride near the beginning of the movie is matched in shock by a sequence near the end in which Yuri’s private cargo plane, loaded with arms, makes a forced landing on an African road, scattering people in terror. Seen from below, the plane arrives like a malignant invader from another planet. Niccol is too smart to preach to us, but his anger and sorrow are there, even as he’s putting on a terrific show.
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/articles/050926crci_cinema
) - is the reason its gotton crummy reviews is BECAUSE its not blatently anti-gun but more anti-international?
