Lord of War (**3/4)

This tries to do for the arms trade what Traffic did for drug dealing, though Blow, the Johnny Depp film, is probably a better antecedent. Nicholas Cage is the title character, who narrates his own rise from Ukranian immigrant to world-class gun peddler. The weapons trade is as worthy of examination as the drug trade, and I wanted to see this movie. I was never bored watching the story, but I never really felt like I’d learned much about the arms trade, the way I’d felt like I’d learning something about the drug trade after watching Traffic or Blow. To his credit, writer-director Andrew Niccol (Gattaca, S1mOne) never romanticizes his main character (a flaw in Blow), but neither does he provide the details that make such a character completely believable. For example, his fluency in Chinese and other languages is explained by saying that he had a gift for picking them up, as if a few chats with a foreign arms dealer would do the job.

Nor does Niccol go very far in explaining the motivations of wealthy nations in the arms industry, or the kinds of moral complexities that evil creates. The mostly Third World victims of war are shown as faceless hordes, though a fictional Liberian dictator is vividly portrayed. Bridget Moynihan plays a counterpart to Catherine Zeta-Jones’s role in Traffic, the trophy wife who’s happy not knowing the source of her lavish lifestyle. Ethan Hawke plays the lone lawman trying to get the goods on Cage.

IMDb link

circulated via email 9/22/05 and posted 11/19/13