Lord of War

Nicholas Cage has an uneven track record with me, to say the least, but in this 2005 Andrew Niccol picture he gets one for the plus column. Cage plays Yuri Orlov, a Ukranian immigrant whose family escaped when his father pretended to be Jewish. Unsatisfied with the family restaurant as a career prospect and captivated by the guns used by neighborhood mobsters, Yuri rides his ambition to the top ranks in the global arms business.

Of course, that means constantly dealing with unsavory characters and living with an intense feeling of insecurity and in this Lord of War plays to Cage’s strength as an actor. He’s hemmed in by family (first brother Jared Leto and then wife Bridget Moynahan and their son), the cops in the form of Ethan Hawke’s Interpol agent, competition from Ian Holm and even nasty customers like Liberian dictator Andre Baptiste Sr. (Eamonn Walker, very different from his spiritual character in HBO’s series Oz) and his insanely violent son Andre Jr.

On the plus side are Yuri’s salesmanship, ability to partition the aspects of his life and an uncle who remained in the Ukraine and rose to become a general at the time the old Soviet Union collapsed, providing him with an amazing inventory source. The title comes from the elder Baptiste and his Norm Crosby-ish word jumbling: Orlov, in one conversation, calls him a warlord but Andre tells Yuri he is the real “lord of war.”

Niccol previously wrote and directed Gattaca and S1m0ne and wrote The Truman Show. I thoroughly enjoyed the latter two but never saw the first so let’s give the Kiwi three for three as he keeps the action flowing, generally avoids getting sidetracked in the obviously tragic uses of the product and provides Cage with a realistic, flawed lead character, allowing his brother (mainly) to suffer the emotional consequences.

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