Hippo Manchester
September 22, 2005
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Lord
of War (R)
by Amy Diaz
Nicholas Cage plays a
man with a talent for amorality and gun-running in the junky-fun Lord of
War.
Until the late
20s/early 30s set in, many a liberal-arts-educated, under-challenged
person believes, in a vague, half-hearted way, that he can still grow
up, go to law school and have the productive, successful, perhaps even
morally-uplifting career every teacher always told him he should have.
Many of these people are not particularly interested in the law but see
the lawyer route as a capper to their indecisive youths that is smart,
responsible and gives a lot of early lousy decision-making some ultimate
purpose.
Replace “law school”
with “international political satire” and “indecisive youth” for “lazy
storytelling” and you’ll get a sense of how the tale of Yuri Orlov
(Cage) plays out. Orlov grows up an immigrant in Brooklyn, headed for a
life of restaurant ownership and pervasive disappointment. But early on
he has a run-in with a mob shooting and gets an idea: guns. Forget about
making money on the crime itself, the real cash is in providing the
weaponry. He quickly figures out that selling guns to local hoodlums
offers very little profit margin and the real money to be made is
overseas, primarily selling first world guns to the third world.
Thus Yuri truly comes
into his own when the Soviet Union falls and he is able to sell the huge
stores of Cold War weapons, primarily to African customers. The money
rolls in, enough to fund his lavish Manhattan apartment and to take care
of his former-model wife (Bridget Moynahan). But Yuri’s got troubles —
his brother and occasional partner Vitaly (Jared Leto) can’t not see the
suffering his products cause and a straight-arrow Interpol agent (Ethan
Hawke) is obsessed with holding Yuri accountable for his crimes.
Lord of War has a point
— ultimately it’s that the United States and its fellow superpower-ish
nations do far more dirty dealings in the Third World than an
independent contractor like Yuri ever could. This is not a blindly
brilliant or original point but blinding brilliance and originality
isn’t exactly the point of this movie. Cage standing on a deck of a
run-down smuggler’s ship wearing a natty suit and looking like a cross
between a CIA agent and an insurance salesman (which, if you think about
it, he is), that’s the point of this movie. Cage has a talent for
unspooling hard truths and unpleasant facts of life and doing so with
enough devilish charm that we want to listen.
Maybe he can’t sell
the lines, maybe he’s always Nicholas Cage playing a part and never Yuri
Orlov attempting to ignore morality but luckily believability isn’t
necessary for the movie to work on the smarty-pants-action level that it
does |
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