Movie Review: Lord of War

Lord of War is a 2005 film written & directed by Andrew Niccol & starring Nicolas Cage. I chanced upon this movie on HBO and decided to research more. Cage plays the antiheroic protagonist, an illegal arms dealer with a striking similarity to real life Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout.

Plot: Illegal Arms Dealing, & Lies
Place: U.S.; Russia; Africa
People: Yuri Orlov (Arms-Dealer), Jack Valentine (Interpol)
Punchline 1: Where there's a will, there's a weapon.
Punchline 2: He sells guns... & he's making a killing.

The movie begins with Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) standing in a sea of spent shell casings (empty bullet) matter-of-factly stating, "There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That's one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do you arm the other eleven?" The opening credits follow the life of a bullet: from a munitions assembly line in Ukraine, to various arms dealing intermediaries, & ending in the head of a small African boy.
The rest of the movie is told in flashback, starting in the 1980s & ending in the completion of the opening scene.

Yuri Orlov describes how he first became an arms dealer. Yuri & his family came to U.S. from Ukraine when he was a young boy. His family owns a restaurant. After Yuri sees a Russian Mafia boss kill his two would-be assassins, he decides to provide another necessity: guns. He partners up with his brother, Vitaly (Jared Leto), & begins selling arms. Yuri keeps his multiple identities & paperwork in a security container. He starts small & begins selling Israeli Uzis & M-16 rifles that the US Army left behind from the 1982 Lebanon War.

As he grows, Yuri tells of his first incident with Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke), an Interpol agent who cannot be bought with money. During his latest business deal with a Bolivian drug lord, Yuri is paid in cocaine instead of cash. Vitaly is unsure of what to do next & asks Yuri what to do. Yuri answers by saying "let's celebrate." They both end up snorting cocaine, but Vitaly becomes addicted, & Yuri takes him to a rehabilitation center.

From then on, Yuri conducts the arms business alone. Shortly after this episode, he begins to court Ava Fontaine (Bridget Moynahan), a successful model who came from the same neighborhood. They marry, move into Manhattan and later have a son.

Yuri gets his big break when the Soviet Union dissolves. Yuri rushes to Russia after watching Gorbachev's Christmas Day 1991 resignation speech on television. He contacts his uncle, Dimitri, a general of the former Red Army, & begins buying Dimitri's tanks and AK-47s to expand his inventory. Shortly after this, Yuri moves on to selling arms to the West African dictator of Liberia, André Baptiste. Baptiste, pleased with the relationship, proclaims that Yuri is a "Lord of War".

Meanwhile, Jack continues his pursuit of Yuri. He discovers that Yuri will soon be making a cargo run to Sierra Leone & intercepts Yuri's cargo plane. Yuri instructs the pilot to land the plane on a dirt road. To destroy the evidence, he gives the entire arms shipment away to passers-by. When Jack finally arrives, the plane is empty, & there is no evidence of the arms shipment.

One day Jack reveals to Ava that Yuri is an arms dealer. At first, she does not believe him, but eventually realizes the truth. Ava confronts him about his business; he promises that he will stop. He makes more legal deals to exploit the resources of poor nations, but complains that the margins are low & competition is high. Six months later, Baptiste & his son come over & visit Yuri (on their way to United Nations headquarters for a peace talk) with another arms deal offer. Yuri initially refuses, but when Baptiste indicates that he will be much more generous than usual, Yuri relents.

He takes Vitaly along to the deal, which turns out to be in Sierra Leone. However, during the deal, Vitaly becomes distressed: he sees men kill a mother & child in a nearby village of unarmed civilians. He pleads with Yuri to cancel the shipment. Yuri tries to convince him that someone else will sell the weapons if they do not; he also argues that both of them will be killed if they try to cancel the deal. Vitaly pretends to agree. However, he takes two grenades, destroys half of Yuri's shipments, and kills Baptiste's son before nearby guards kill him. Yuri only receives half of the payment due to the destruction of the weapons. He then delivers one of the film's most memorable lines, "They say that 'evil prevails when good men fail to act.' They ought to say 'evil prevails.'"

Yuri ships his brother's remains back to the U.S.. He pays someone to remove the bullets from Vitaly's body & forge a death certificate, but one bullet remains, & Yuri is stopped by customs. Meanwhile, while being followed by Jack, Ava finds Yuri's security container, finally establishing the definitive proof of Yuri's guilt. Ava takes their son & leaves him. When Yuri calls his parents, his mother says, "Both my sons are dead."

Jack detains Yuri & tell tells him that he has a long jail sentence ahead of him, but Yuri abruptly brings him back to reality. He then proclaims himself as a "necessary evil," as he does transactions that the United States federal government is afraid to do. Yuri also explains that the U.S sells more guns than he does & that a trial would reveal these embarassing truths. Yuri is released as a result.

A free man again, & without his family and friends, he returns to selling arms without guilt. The movie ends by proclaiming on-screen that it is "based on actual events" and that, while arms traders like Yuri Orlov continue to thrive, the U.S., the UK, France, Russia and China (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council) are the world's leading arms dealers.

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)