There's nothing illegal about what I did!

Rating: 8/10 (11 August 2012)

***SPOILERS*** On target and chilling movie about he dirty business of arms dealing with Nicolas Cage who personally financed the film as Ukrainian, passing for Jewish, immigrant Yuri Orlov who realized the American dream in making it big but not the way he at first expected to. Seeing the deadly gun play among the Russian mob in his crime infested neighborhood in Brighten Beach Brooklyn Yuri decided to get in on the action. Not by joining any Russian/Unkainian gang but in providing them with the guns to kill themselves. It's not long before Uri works his way up from providing local street gangs with guns but entire nations, mostly in Africa and the Middle-East, with not only guns but missiles hand grenades tanks and even attack helicopters to not only wipe out their enemies but their own people.
Yuri for his part stays away from the action or bloodshed and just concentrates on the money, tens of millions of dollars, that he gets for selling his merchandise of death acting as if he's an legitimate businessman making and honest buck to support himself and his family. Always a step ahead of US Government ATF Agent Jack Valentine,Ethan Hawke, Yuri seems untouchable from the law both in the USA and the International or World Court. But he's not immune from those that he deals with, a bunch of lowlifes like himself, to whom the law means nothing to. It's when Yuri who was later trying to go straight by cleaning up his act, and getting out of the arms dealing business, is contacted by a former client of his Monrovia Dictator Andre Baptiste, Eamonn Walker, with an offer that he couldn't refuse that his life turned upside down. Yuri is blackmailed to supply Baptiste with modern arms and ammunition in order to massacre his own people who don't support his bloody regime or he'll give Agent Valentine all the evidence he needs to hang him. It was in fact Baptiste who forced Yuri to personally murder, with a .357 magnum, one of his biggest competitors in the arms selling business Simeon Weisz, Ian Holm, and that alone can have him sent up the river for life. That far more then the thousands of innocent people who were slaughter by ruthless dictators like Baptiste whom he sold his merchandise of death to.
Having his kid brother Vitaly, Jared Leto, a recovering cocaine addict come along with him to Monrovia to iron out a deal with Baptiste things go dangerously wrong for Yuri. Vitaly who incredibly enough had no idea of what Baptiste was all about, a ruthless bloodthirsty maniac, saw his soldiers machete a mother and infant, who tried to escape, to death outside one of his concentration camps! Realizing what he'll do to his people with the modern and state of the art arms that his brother is selling him Vitaly flips out and ends up, with a live hand grenade, destroying half of the arms shipment Yuri brought for him as well as getting himself gunned down by one of Baptiste soldiers! It's then that Yuri realizes that there's now no turning back from the road that he choose in life. And now with him disowned by his friends and family,in finding out what he's in to, Yuri like a puppet on a string goes back to selling arms to anyone or any third world country who's willing to pay for them. With him now knowing, as if he didn't from the start, that for the time being until it gets someone better to replace him with Yuri is totally immune from being arrested and prosecuted by his own government for what he's doing because he has its full backing and support in doing the work, as a middleman, that it doesn't want to be accused of.
Honest and disturbing movie in what's really going on in the world at large in the proxy and civil wars and conflicts that are being supported under the table by the likes of arm dealers like Yuri Orlov with the full support of the five permanent members of the UN Security Console the USA UK France Russia & China who's job it is to promote world peace. But who are in fact the biggest arms dealers, legal & illegal, on the planet!
P.S Check out former Soviet Premiere Nikhail Gorbachnev in a cameo appearance in the film announcing the dissolving of the nation that he's in charge of-The Soviet Union- as a Christmas present to the world on Christmas day 1991.