Well-meaning, but a lot too much.

Rating: 5/10 (19 June 2010)

I'm amused by the reviewer who referred to Andrew Niccol as a 'new starter'. Not only is he of course a well-seasoned filmmaker, he has a reputation for exactly this kind of film. However, this is where Lord of War fails.
While there's much in this film to be applauded, both stylistically and in terms of its overall message, unfortunately with regard to the latter it's far too much of a blunt instrument. Where this doesn't compare favourably with Niccol's other notable moral tale, Gattacca, is the complete lack of emotional engagement with the characters.
A worthy and certainly purposeful moral is fine, but it's no good unless it comes to the screen through the experience of characters we care about. What engages the film viewer is the personal narrative, not the explanation, and this film is just full of explanation, with very little story. I'm always a little worried when a film begins with first-person narration, and in this instance my worry was justified. Cage's voice-over arises throughout, and despite a periodical nicely poetic turn, it never strays from the boringly pedagogic. We get it already, guns are bad, and the people who sell them sell their souls to ignore the effect they have. Would that this had been put much, much more succinctly and with greater dramatic effect.
Testament to this problem is the simple proportion of the story dedicated to the protagonist's family. His wife's eventual betrayal of him to the authorities packs no emotional punch whatsoever - it's just an inevitable outcome with no resonance for the character. His son is nothing more than a plot point, a foil for a throwaway comment about an African child of the same age who is butchered by soldiers while Uri seals an arms deal with them. Again, it packs no emotional punch, because we simply don't know his son.
If further evidence were needed of the story's shortcomings, the Ethan Hawke character, a morally upright lawman on Uri's case, personifies this. Again, there is no sense of any emotional purpose to the character. Why is he so obsessed with Uri? Why does he need to pursue this world of shady arms deals? What is his reason for despising this world of amoral jiggery-pokery so? His explanation when he has Uri sat in cuffs by his grounded freight plane is nothing more than trite, hollow statistics. It sounds like so many cold, numbers-driven political objections. They may be perfectly just, but they are not real, not, at least, when it comes to the motivation of someone so apparently obsessed with changing an evil practice like this. The reasons we do things are not the reasons why they are wrong, but the reasons why they matter TO US. None of it mattered to me, the viewer, a chronic shortcoming with something that so obviously matters.
While it would take an unusual individual to disagree with the general message of this film, it would also take someone especially unaware not to have grasped that message within about the first three minutes, indeed, by the end of the opening sequence. What we get, then, is another hundred minutes of making the same point. The power of drama, and perhaps of film especially, is in translating meaning, purpose, truth, through the filmmaker's skill, into an emotionally or comically engaging story, one that we care about by virtue of what it is, not the message it presents. The message is obvious enough - the benefit of film is its ability to make people care about the people involved. Lord of War critically fails to do this. So concerned is it with conveying a message that is untarnished and unmistakable, that it forgets that it is supposed to be about real people, strong characters, in real emotional, psychological and moral jeopardy. It's a shame that it didn't manage this.
Gattacca is one of the great films of our time, exactly because we do care about Vincent, and because his rebellion against an amoral world is intensely personal. The Truman Show stands out as a wonderful piece of modern questioning about our world, our perception, our view of who and what we are. But both of these films of Niccol's managed sufficiently to blend an earnest moral with succinct, colourful, emotionally dramatic and sometimes comical personal stories. They left room for the viewer to find the message, and to care about it all the more because it came through the medium of characters who mattered. This is left behind almost completely in Lord of War, and it fails far too obviously. It's a shame.