\Lord of War"" opens with one of the most impressive and provocative credit sequences in recent memory. Adopting a point-of-view perspective, the camera follows a bullet from its manufacture in an American factory to various ports, then across the globe to a small African village where it is placed in the chamber of a pistol and shot through the skull of a young boy.
In time, the viewer learns that the bullet from the opening is no different than the ammunition that arms dealer Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) sells every day. During a confrontation between Yuri and Interpol agent Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke), Yuri is told, ""you get rich by giving the poorest people on the face of the planet the means to continue killing themselves."" Maybe so, but as Yuri sees it, like his immigrant parents who run a restaurant, he too helps fulfill a basic human need.
The film, written and directed by Andrew Niccol (""Gattaca,"" writer of ""The Truman Show""), has already garnered comparisons to ""Goodfellas,"" and not without reason. Like the latter, ""War"" is heavy on voice-over narration and charters the rise and fall of a man in an immoral business. However, while ""Goodfellas"" allowed us to sympathize with its protagonist, ""War"" does not.
The plot follows Yuri's rise to the top of the international gunrunning business, stopping along the way to introduce his sometimes business partner and cocaine addict brother, Vitaly (Jared Leto), his model turned trophy wife (Bridget Moynahan), a rival arms dealer who wants him dead (Ian Holm), a syntactically challenged, gun-loving African warlord (Eamonn Walker) and Valentine, the government agent tracking Yuri down.
If this summary of characters seems hollow, it's a fair representation of the film itself, which deals in archetypes. ""War"" is a film in which the story takes a backseat to the subject, the characters on-screen serving primarily as agents by which to deliver an anti-gun diatribe.
To Niccol's credit, the screenplay is full of one-liners that contain more wit than entire movies. Take, for instance, Yuri's observation that, ""Often, the most barbaric encounters occur when both sides declare themselves 'freedom fighters',"" or that ""bullets change governments far better than votes.""
Ironically, for a film concerned with the tools of war, it seems to be at war with itself. In the hands of Niccol, the film feels like a documentary operating under the guise of a slick, Hollywood action picture.
Heavy on voice-over, statistics and adopting the fall of the Berlin wall, the O.J. Simpson trial and the Bush-Gore election as political backdrops, the film seems unconcerned with telling a story after the first act, reverting instead to aggressive didacticism. While Niccol criticizes the violence onscreen, the slick production values act contrary to his intentions, glamorizing weapons in a film that has more AK-47s than Willy Wonka had chocolate.
There can be little doubt that ""War"" is a politically relevant film. Because of its shortcomings, however, it fails to be an important film. Despite an abundance of satire, the bleak film will fail to properly inform or entertain mainstream audiences.
