Thank you for fighting

Rating: 5/10 (17 April 2010)

Andrew Niccol's film 'Lord of War' is in places amusing, and its heart is in the right place, but fundamentally it's a somewhat pointless satire about the arms trade. Not dissimilarly to 'Thank You For Smoking', it suggests that in a bad world, everybody's compromised but some worse than others; however, it's the worst guys who have more fun. The problem is that this message is both everything and nothing; holding people to account for general badness (but partially forgiving them because of the state of the world) lacks the impact of a specific charge. The use of the song 'Alleluia' on the soundtrack, surely the most over-used music in contemporary film, typifies the blandness of the film's vision. But the corrupt world of gun-running is portrayed here cartoonishly, so we don't really care when people get massacred, and the flimsy treatment can't really bear the belated attempt to add moral weight.