Bad action movie with pretensions

Rating: 2/10 (16 September 2005)

This is a seemingly committed movie that, at first glance, has good intentions and pretends to say a lot; however, in the end, it is a flat and profoundly dishonest crowd-pleaser for action-movie goers, who might like guns, this (alas!) necessary evil, but who also have a nice bleeding heartfor arms dealers.
The Lord of War is Yuri an American of Ukrainian descent that decides to escape the bleak looking prospects of a life in Little Odessa for a lucrative business: arms dealing. Niccol tells all the Trivial Pursuit information concerning arms dealing through the cynical and tireless main protagonist's off voice, or through any of the nice characters that happen to be there when Niccol feels like being engagé and transcendent. His indignation seems sincere but he had trouble canalizing it in a story. Once we know the "facts" (startling if you have never opened a newspaper), he can focus on the story, or rather on the action. The movie wants so much to follow the different conflicts of the last twenty years that it races through diverse exotic locations and leaves little time to tell us a story and something about the characters. Yuri tells us his lucid view on the greed and cruelty that rule the world, on the ambiguity and ambivalence of international relations and armed conflicts, and yet, the characters that surround him in the story are the fairytale one-dimensional loving parents, wife, brother, kid and even an Ukranian general. All the characters are flat and embarrassingly cliché: the emigrants to the US are nice people with accent, the Russian mob is crazy, Ukranian generals are drunkards, but good-hearted, the beautiful girl, naïve and angelical, the Interpol agent, innocent and idealistic, and Africans are very bad or very good depending on whether they have guns or not. Curiously, only the Liberian dictator seems real. The weakest character is Yuri himself. His motivation to go into the dirty business remains obscure. Paradoxically, he is a bland and passive character, who seems to have entered the risky trade by chance, and who can change jobs overnight, when his wife manifests a much delayed indignation. It can be argued that since it is Yuri that tells his own story, he is seeking the audience's sympathy. But he tries too hard, and we cannot help thinking that he does so with the connivance of Niccol. We are shown a likable character, not because an aseptic Niccol wants to look as lucid and cynical as his protagonist, but because, in the end, Niccol like Yuri wants to please too many people. By leaving the story in the hands of his protagonist, he can appeal to a very demanding and highly ironic and smart public as well as to a wider male audience of American action-movie goers who, like Yuri, like guns, hot dumb chicks and subtle displays of humour and profound international knowledge about Russian cars and suicidal novelists, Aids in Africa, cocaine in South America. There is an unresolved contrast between the discourse and the story, between what the movie courageously says and what it cowardly shows. One scene epitomizes the movie fundamental dishonesty: when Yuri's plane loaded with arms lands on an African road full of people, not a single crushed body is shown, only a little baby miraculously saved as the huge wheel of the plane stops in front of him. In the end, the movie tells a story that we have seen a thousand times, and more harshly told, about the double life of a mobster with a dirty job but with a nice loving family. "Lord of War" is nothing more than a bad action movie with pretensions. The worst part is that ultimately it leaves us, the intended Western audience of pampered pop corn gobblers who have never (but seem to wish they had) smelled the nice perfume of napalm in the morning, with the same complacent and cynical attitude of the protagonist towards violence, gun trafficking and world-wide corruption.