Political overtone and weak action spoils movie

Rating: 3/10 (18 September 2005)

I went into this movie expecting what I saw on the trailer, a good action movie with plenty of shoot 'em up and explosions. It turns out I was deceived. The movie starts out with Cage standing in the middle of a sea of shells talking about how there's enough guns to arm 1 in 12 people on the planet (as you saw on the trailer). Fine, that's a good kickoff to a movie about guns and war. Then immediately on the next scene they go into their political rampage. You start by seeing a bullet being stamped out on an assembly line (actually very fascinating) and you see it go from a factory, to a box, to a general, then to a warlord in Africa. Finally they show the bullet being loaded into an AK-47 and being used to shoot a pre-teenage African boy.
OK, at this point I immediately became skeptical about the rest of the movie, but decided I could tough it out for the action promised in the trailer. Well I was deceived again; the rest of the movie plays out like a documentary with Cage doing a running commentary as he grows up from a humble beginning and becomes this arms dealer. The action throughout the movie is very light, and the plot does not involve anything other than the greed of this man in specific and all gun manufacturers/dealers in general.
On top of the fact that there is little action in the movie the writers seem to be preoccupied with the idea that guns in and of themselves are the source of all evil in the world. They go through many scenes where guns are used to commit genocide against people and to prop up evil dictators.
The movie finishes by saying that this is based on real events (yeah right) and that the largest manufacturers and exporters of weapons in the world are the US and other western nations. While also implying the fact that the US is one of the countries that supplies arms to these genocidal dictators. If I wanted to see a movie about how evil guns and the US are I could watch a Michael Moore movie; I was looking for a good action movie without any political overtones. This movie could not deliver it.