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Lord of War
Nicolas Cage – a businessman standing in a sea of spent shells in the middle of a deserted war zone. “There are 555 million firearms in the world,” he tells us. “That’s one for every 12 people on the planet. The only question is, how do we arm the other 11?” Cute. For an encore – and a title sequence – director Andrew Niccol gives us a shell’s eye view of life, from the factory conveyor belt right through to Nirvana – in this case the splattered brains of some poor African boy-soldier. Double cute. 
By now if you’re halfway movie literate you should be thinking Three Kings and Fight Club, both of which pulled the bullet trajectory gag in their own peculiarly sick and twisted ways. Lord of War isn’t quite of that caliber, if you’ll excuse the pun, but provocative black comedy seems to be a perfectly sane response to the egregious excesses of rampant capitalism. Niccol wrote The Truman Show and directed Gattaca (the less said about Simone the better). He’s a smart writer with his finger on the zeitgeist, and he packs the movie with no end of inflammatory materials: Cage is Yuri Orlov, a second generation American of Russian descent (his parents claimed to be Jewish and his father seems to believe it). We follow his career in gun-running from the late 1970s through to the twenty first century, a career which touches on Beirut in 84, the end of the Cold War, Liberia, and Afghanistan (“I never sold to Osama, not on moral grounds – back then he was always bouncing cheques”). 
This is hair-trigger stuff, and occasionally it blows up in Niccol's face. Subplots involving Jared Leto, as Yuri’s brother, and Bridget Moynahan as his model trophy wife aren’t as fleshed out as they might be, so the climax doesn’t have the punch it should. On the other hand, there likely won’t be another mainstream movie this year which sticks its head this far out of the parapet. Tom Charity Watch the Lord of War trailer 
More information about Lord of War » Critics' Reviews
Radio Times
In this sombre, beautifully photographed historical epic, Charlton Heston plays a feudal warlord who exerts his droit du seigneur — the knight's right to spend the night with any new wife-to-be he chooses. On this occasion, he selects blushing bride Rosemary Forsyth but Heston only takes her reluctantly since he's delirious from a wound and — against all reason — he seems influenced by pagan tradition and the druid fertility symbols that litter the landscape of 11th-century Normandy. While Heston's savage haircut is a definite distraction, the way the movie subverts his epic El Cid persona makes this a fascinating, literate and rather disturbing excursion into the past. Sight and Sound Cage has excelled at playing gaunt-faced but sympathetic loners. He excels again here in a role that allows him to show his flair for deadpan comedy... Time Out Lord of War kicks off with a sensational opening sequence that follows the journey of a bullet from inception on... read more on www.timeout.com Members' ReviewsReviews Voted Most HelpfulMost Recent Reviews |