well acted but too politically heavy-handed

Rating: 4/10 (18 September 2005)

Think grey. Lord of War while a good movie technically--the acting is sound, the story is relatively tight, and it has a good "texture" to it for what it's trying to portrayit is not a well-balanced movie and portrays a worldview of hopelessness and will-to-power fatalism. The world is grey, ethically, politically, socially. The only way to navigate a grey world is to wield the most power and don't allow yourself to think about the rest. "There are three way to sell arms. White-legally, Black-illegally, and, my personal favorite, grey." says the film's main character.
Lord of War feels almost like a documentary as it traces the life of a very successful arms trafficker Yuri Orlov (Cage). Orlov is a man of almost no feeling, certainly one of no moral sense, and who is extremely talented at selling arms internationally. Orlov travels the globe selling small and large arms literally to anyone who will buy while evading the law, bribing officials, doing drugs, and having sex. By the end of the movie Orlov is legally untouchable though he's not megalomaniacal. He has a good sense of his place and wields his power by filling his role with precision.
Lord of War is cynical both in it's view of the world and it's portrayal of the human response to evil. Actually, in this film, there are no neat distinctions between good and evil. The line that sums up the movie best were in the mouth of Orlov, "They say that evil prevails when good men do nothing... Actually what they should say is that evil prevails." Agent Jack Valentine (Hawke) plays an innocuous would-be spoiler to Orlov's cynicism and play far too minor a role in this film in this writer's opinion. Valentine still believes in right and wrong but seems to have no adequate answers to Orlov's frequent a-moralizing. The feeling you get is that there are no answers and that's why /director Andrew Niccol puts none in the mouth of Valentine.
The movie is somewhat drab and methodical partly because Niccol wants us to focus on the message not the special effects or even the technical details. This film, like so many modern films has no hero. Valentine is powerless, the U.N. is corrupt and impotent, there's no world leader that isn't self-absorbed, and even friends and family are motivated by drugs and money. Niccol, who wrote the screenplay for one of my favorite movies, The Truman Show, may now see clearly the outcome of facing a world without Godmoral decision making becomes very difficult if not impossible. Cynicism is the last defense.
Still, for all the film's cynicism, fatalism, and amorality, Niccol clearly doesn't participate in the same worldview as his anti-hero. Niccol clearly wants us to walk out of the movie with a clear moral message: guns are bad and the people that sell them (the US, George Bush, and other members of the U.N. Security Council) are evil. Niccol seems to have no problem making clear moral judgments. Too bad he doesn't allow his characters to do the same.