Lots of potential, little capitalization

Rating: Null/10 (11 March 2006)

Lord of War is a genre-mixing political semi-satirical drama. It features many lines of quotable dialogue, a story packed with bloodshed and morality, and sex and drugs. But after the credits role, it's not the quality that will stick in mind, it's the flaws.
First among those, there's not much of a story. The film follows an arms dealer from his first backdoor dealings to international war supplier. The first hour feels like exposition without plot, and so does much of the second. The movie is too undecided whether it wants to be a cat-and-mouse game, a serious drama, a political satire, or a love story / family epic, or even an action film. In the end, there's too little of every theme for any of them to grab the audience.
The hero is a psychopath (in terms of being completely incapable of feeling compassion or emotion, and being a terribly dispassionate, wily character). Which means Nicolas Cage is terribly miscast, as he-of-the-sad-eyes is entirely unconvincing for the role, and spends too much time trying to be sympathetic to the audience, while spouting unsympathetic lines and doing unsympathetic actions. It's almost as if his face is on a different script from his mouth and hands.
In the end, Lord of War is a movie that was too ambitious, and failed to work. The humour needed better delivery (no Nicolas Cage), the preachiness is too obvious, the narration is too corny, the drama is too uninvolving, the suspense is too watered down... It's like Syriana, only less well executed.