One thought

Rating: 3/10 (27 February 2006)

One thought went through my mind as the overblown starting credits to this movie rolled over the screen: MTV. Without MTV we wouldn't have movies like this one. I remember seeing a sort of AIDS-themed weekend on MTV once, and this movie is like that weekend only here we are dealing with guns. So if MTV ever chose to do an "MTV: Gun Weekend" it would be something like this movie.
Nicholas Cage (looking more or less constantly bored) is the hotshot arms dealer in this movie. A Ukrainian American starting out with small deals on UZI:s and ending up selling half the Ukrainian Soviet arsenal to third world countries at war. And all the while, not a single emotion shown in any of the characters. Except perhaps from the perpetually depressed dope-head brother of Cage, played by Jared Leto.
I don't demand much from movies like this one. Sure a pop-culture styled drama about guns could work. But here we have a movie that also wants to portray a person that should at least be halfway believable and who is supposed to be an amalgam of a bunch of real arms-dealers. And yet, with all those personalities in him we don't get a schizophrenic person, rather we get a cardboard character. A person completely bereft of any humanity. He just walks through life doing things like a machine, never saying "why". He doesn't seem to enjoy his work, his wife or his money. So what is his motivation? Apparently nothing.
Beside the shallowness of the character this movie is a true believer in the thesis "style over substance". It seems more like an experiment in style and special effects than a real movie with a real message. Message? Well, when you make a drama like this one asking so many questions about guns and the morality of selling them one could actually expect a message. I would have settled for something like "decide for yourself whether the arms-dealer is evil", but we don't even get that. This is a waste of time.