Badfellas.

Rating: 8/10 (12 May 2011)

The protagonist, Nicholas Cage (nee Nicholas Coppola), grows up with his younger brother, Jared Leto, in an immigrant community in Brooklyn in the 1980s. Crime and shootings are all around. Soon, the street-savvy Cage latches on to a way to make some money out of the deal. "It's not white and it's not black. It's the way I like it, gray." Cage narrates the movie in a cool and ironic way, explaining things to us like a tourist guide.
His working-class parents are morally upright but Cage and his brother begin selling weapons small time. The ambitious Cage begins to make higher-echelon friends and graduates to a larger scale enterprise, with phony passports, international sales trips, bribery, networking his relatives in the Ukraine, and whatnot. His chief product is the AK 47, which is cheap, reliable, and simple to operate.
And the work itself is surprisingly easy. Okay. You have a few dozen attack helicopters you want to ship from one point to another but it's against the law to ship armed helicopters. It's not against the law to ship the weapons and the ammunition, just the craft themselves. No problem. You just unship the weapons and transport them separately. If anyone objects to the helicopters, you tell them they are now rescue craft. The bribery helps smooth over complicated transactions.
Usually, the transactions are even simpler. After the collapse of the USSR, the Ukraine was without a functioning government but had stores of AK 47s. If the inventory says there are, say, 41,000 such automatic weapons, Cage points out to the officer in charge that that "4" looks like a "1" to him. The bribery smooths things over.
Cage acquires as a wife a slinky model whose photos he's always salivated over, though he tells her nothing about his business. He leaves his brother behind, as he climbs the ladder, pursued now by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms as well as Interpol.
Now he's fabulously wealthy. His stretch limousine purrs as it swooshes him through the streets of Manhattan. There are women on the side, of course, although he has to be careful in Africa -- too many cases of AIDS and too few condoms. And that ten-ton car? He has to watch it sometimes because it's being tracked by the occasional helicopter. Then, too, once in a while one of his cars explodes when someone tries to start it.
The ending has Cage trying to reform but being forced by one of his clients into a last deal. It's trickier than he thought, and he loses his brother. Then his wife finds out what he's been up to and she takes their child and leaves him flat.
Cage is arrested by his nemesis, Ethan Hawke, but is released by an officer of high rank in the U.S. Army. The government finds Cage's services sometimes valuable. Sometimes the government wants arms to reach a certain group without the government itself having been involved. Private enterprise, you know, solves a lot of problems. Cage regrets his losses but shrugs them off and goes back to what he does so well, selling illegal arms on the international market. He doesn't say, "Why mess with a good thing?", but he might as well have.
Now -- who directed it? WRONG. It's not Michael Scorsese. It's Andrew Nicol, who also wrote it.
You can tell it's not Scorsese because, though it may end in resignation and acceptance, the film clearly disapproves of the events that play out on the screen. There is a rather lengthy epilogue and a fantasy shot of millions of empty cartridges in case we haven't gotten the point yet.
Nicholas Cage is reliable as the narrator and protagonist. He's always reliable, no matter how shabby the part, and this part isn't shabby. Of course the subject could hardly be more important. Nukes are nothing compared to the dangers presented by a sea of Kalashnikov 47s, which have killed millions and are now represented on one African country's coin and another's national flag.
Nice photography. Nice production values. When a scene is supposed to take place in Sudan, we can believe it's the Sudan. And Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, looks thoroughly dilapidated and ratty.
There are times when the film's joints creak as it reaches out to instruct the more naive among us -- that final shot of a carpet of empty brass, and the narrator's comment that every warlord's group has some fancy name like "Democratic Freedom Fighters." Well, you know, if we haven't slept through this century so far, we probably already know that.
None of this criticism should prevent anyone from watching the movie. It alternates pedagogy with brutality in the manner of Scorsese's better works.