Where There's A Will, There's A Weapon: Lord Of War
written by Rob Williams

Meet international businessman Yuri Orlov. Son of working class Ukrainian immigrants who opened a restaurant in Big Apple's Little Odessa, Yuri has achieved the “American Dream.” He's got a glamorous wife. A handsome son. A posh penthouse. An impressive collection of three pieces, sunglasses, and suitcases for every occasion. He only has one little problem.

Yuri is an international arms dealer.

At first, Yuri (played with customary deadpan charm by Nicholas Cage) doesn't see anything wrong with his chosen line of work. Like so many others who profit from other people's misery, he constructs elaborate rationales for his behavior. Like the NRA says - Guns don't kill people, right? He's simply a businessman fulfilling a need. “There are 550 million firearms in the world, one for every twelve people,” he observes at film's beginning. “The only question is – how do we arm the other eleven?”

Written and directed by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, The Truman Show), “Lord of War” adeptly uses the fictional life of one man to reveal some unpleasant truths about one of the world's most profitable and deadly industries. Cage's Orlov, who narrates much of the story, goes about his business with wry wit, and an appreciation for the many ironies involved with selling weapons to some of the richest and the poorest people on the planet. “I sell to every army but the Salvation Army,” he says at one point. “But I never sold to Osama during the 1980s – back then, he was always bouncing checks.”

But here's another problem. Selling arms in many parts of the world is illegal, at least in theory. Yuri's trophy wife (Bridget Moynahan) doesn't ask any questions. But Interpol agent Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke) is not so forgiving. Pursuing Orlov from one side of the globe to the other, Valentine serves as the film's somewhat moralistic voice of reason. “You get rich by giving the poorest people on the planet the means to continue killing each other,” he snarls at Orlov. But even Interpol agents, as the film reveals, are not able to bring down a trade as lucrative as Yuri's, who also must fight off rival suppliers competing for his business.

Not since director David O. Russell's “Three Kings” (1999) has a Hollywood film tackled uncomfortable truths about the way the world really works. Niccol and Cage delivers the goods, making “Lord of War” a story driven by cynical sound bites and moments of cinematographic brilliance. The film opens in mesmerizing fashion with a “bull's eye view” of a bullet's production – from domestic factory meltdown to its journey into war-torn foreign lands – where it embeds itself, slow-mo style, in a child's skull. Playing over this montage is Buffalo Springfield's “For What Its Worth.” There's something happening here, indeed.

In another key scene, Orlov is in the middle of a trans-oceanic tanker journey, secretly transporting a giant cache of weapons under an assumed identity, when he gets word that an Interpol vessel is ten minutes away from boarding. Orlov drops his crew of sign painters over the ship's side, gets on the horn to his computer people, and within moments has transformed his ship's identity, while managing to disguise the weapons under a crop of rotting potatoes.

The most remarkable moment comes when Interpol forces Orlov to land a cargo plane full of weapons in Sierre Leone. While Orlov manages to give the weapons away to African villagers before Interpol arrives to make the bust (“They'd find more guns on a plane-ful of Quakers,” Cage wryly notes), Niccol gives us a 24-hour time-lapse scene In which the entire cargo plane is systematically dismantled for scrap. The scene lasts a mere ten seconds – but is a stunning illustration of the global gap between rich and poor.

And I won't ruin the ending for you here, other than to say that Niccol gets to the heart of the matter in the film's closing moments, and then leaves the audience seeking solutions that the film simply refuses to provide. While “Lord of War,” pulls more punches than it throws, Niccol and Cage have teamed up to give us one of the edgiest and most provocative films of the year. Don't miss it.