Mocumentary?

Rating: 7/10 (24 October 2015)

This film is rather hard to classify. Is it a black comedy? A pseudo documentary? A war film? A drama that studies a really cold-blooded character who does what he does "because he does it best?" I finally settled on Mockumentary.
Yet Nicholas Cage pulls it off. He is the most cold-blooded SOB one can imagine: the combination to the container filled with weapons to kill thousands is the birth date of his son. In the end, his brother rebels while they deliver arms, after he sees soldiers hack a woman and child to death with machetes. When the soldiers negotiating the arms deal mow Cage's brother down with machine guns, Cage continues negotiating: why get himself killed, too?
It's hard to imagine someone like that can exist, but after all, Cage is just a bigger version of the machete-wielders. And according to the film, just poppycocks compared to the presidents of the US, Russia, France etc, who deal in arms and destruction on a yet greater scale.
Indeed at the end of the film, just like these leaders of entire countries, Cage is "too big to fail." He laughs in the face of the justice department agent who captured him with solid evidence in hand, and wants to put Cage behind bars for good. Cage explains to him with a smile what is really going to happen once he leaves the room, and so it does.
At which point we return to Cage as the narrator, full circle with the beginning of the film, except now we get to see what makes the crunching sound under his shoes: millions of bullets, just like the one that we followed from manufacture to the skull of a child in the opening credits.
The film certainly preaches, but in a way so absurd, matter-of-fact and darkly comedic that it does not appear heavy-handed, merely unbelievable. And yet we know all too well that the events we see in the film, the useless maiming and killing of millions, happened. And the arms to do the deed did come from somewhere.
The film sometimes descends into mocking itself, at other times the pieces fall into place too conveniently, so it remains merely very good. But well worth watching, even if you're not into conspiracy theories.