More preoccupied with attitude than accuracy, Lord Of War conceives of a Brighton Beach small time gun runner turned international major player arms dealer who functions equally beyond governments and historical fact. Hollywood's fascination with rags to riches lore tends to strain credibility and has a long tradition evidenced most recently with Ron Howard's Cinderella, Man not to mention a tidied up Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator. And Lord Of War's free lance gun racketeer Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) is no exception. It's as if the instant happy endings of shows like American Idol are having an added unhealthy impact on Hollywood so-called biopics.

Staking out that dubious "based on a true story" claim from the start that always makes critics cringe or shake their heads in dismay, Andrew Niccol's Lord Of War attaches its bogus story to the notorious real life Victor Bout. A former KGB agent who is accused of enriching himself off the huge stockpiles of military weapons and planes following the end of the Soviet Union and along with it the Cold War, Bout illegally and covertly peddled this hardware around the globe.

To make their story more audience-friendly and substantially less historically complex, Hollywood has Americanized Bout, morphing him into Orlov, a Ukrainian transplant to Brighton Beach. Rejecting the ordinary and unexciting static life of his parents, who run a seedy local borsht eatery after getting out of the Ukraine by pretending to be Jews, Orlov dashes up a very different career food chain. He rapidly graduates from punk gun supplier for the Brooklyn mob, along with emotionally fragile younger sibling Vitali (Jared Leto), to free lance illegal arms tycoon in places like Lebanon and Africa. But never once to Bin Laden, he cautions (as if we the audience are contemplating joining him in the biz), because he tends to pass bad checks.

So what we get with Lord Of War is endlessly gabby first person narrator Cage, bragging about Orlov's outlandish exploits while he zips along under the radar, as self-congratulatory moral rationalizations pile up. In thankless pursuit of Orlov across the globe is seething but fairly impotent Interpol agent Valentine (Ethan Hawke). In a perplexing finale when Valentine finally corners his man and packs him off to jail, Orlov informs the sucker that he'll be on the street again in a flash because all the powerful governments of the world need him and protect him, especially the biggest arms dealer of them all, the United States.

Now one of my biggest pet peeves of all about movies, happens to be absentee plot elements that get hastily tacked on at the end as an afterthought, less likely a result of thematic sloppiness than political and career anxiety about corporate film industry repercussions resulting from defiantly revealing assertions. The US government and specifically the CIA blatantly engage in these activities, with all sorts of Orlovs no doubt slithering around in the mix somewhere. And this huge chunk of vital information is by glaring omission the far more intriguing story that sadly never made it to the screen.

Prairie Miller
Arts Magazine Screening Room
WBAI Arts Magazine