Sunday, March 05, 2006
Lord of War
Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) finds himself face to face with his worst enemy, tied to a chair. A Liberian dictator gleefully hands Yuri a gun and tells him to fire away, but Yuri is terrified. The dictator takes Yuri’s hands as if he were helping a child and helps him fire, blowing the other man’s brains out. Yuri may have sold millions of weapons to people all over the world, but he has never fired a single shot.
This was Lord of War’s best scene, a glaring standout in a film soaked with mediocre, gloomy cynicism. Writer/Director Andrew Niccol desperately wants to say something about the arms trade that gives people in third-world countries the means to butcher each other, but his obvious lack of answers infects the entire screenplay. By the end, Niccol’s desperation is palatable as the final ten minutes spirals into an entirely different message than the 110 that preceded it.
Growing up a Ukrainian immigrant in New York, Yuri works at his father’s restaurant. After witnessing a gang shooting, he realizes that he should sell something that everyone needs other than food. He works his way from selling Uzi’s to thugs to bringing shiploads of AK-47’s to dictators. Though a relentless Interpool agent (Ethan Hawke, playing self as a naïve doofus) hounds him at times, Yuri finds the arms trade to be eerily lucrative.
An atheist-existentialist, Yuri never so much as shrugs at the suggestion that his actions are wrong. He hurls heavy handed lines like "You know who's going to inherit the world? Arms dealers. Because everyone else is too busy killing each other," every thirty seconds or so, in case we forget that he possesses a cynical world-view. He traipses around the world, narrating in monotone about how much profitable arms sales are, people killing each other, not giving a shit, etc.
Nearly every line and character exists solely for the purpose of illustrating a message Niccol isn’t even certain of. Never does the film make a serious attempt at balancing the gloom and doom. Yuri’s trophy wife lives the high life off his blood money, then dubiously insists he quit. Yuri brings coke-head brother (Jared Leto) along for no reason other than that the screenplay needs a martyr. And in case we didn’t think Yuri was bad enough, the vicious Liberian murders his underlings on a whim. There have been Bond films with more layered characters, and I’ve seen a few with Roger Moore.
Lord of War gets a few shots into the 10-ring with some black humor and appropriately grim photography, but results in a total misfire. Someone should send Andrew Niccol a memo explaining that relentless cynicism unopposed results in mere whining; Lord of War whines so loud it could be heard over a volley of the machine guns Yuri uses to pay for his limo.
2 out of 5
This was Lord of War’s best scene, a glaring standout in a film soaked with mediocre, gloomy cynicism. Writer/Director Andrew Niccol desperately wants to say something about the arms trade that gives people in third-world countries the means to butcher each other, but his obvious lack of answers infects the entire screenplay. By the end, Niccol’s desperation is palatable as the final ten minutes spirals into an entirely different message than the 110 that preceded it.
Growing up a Ukrainian immigrant in New York, Yuri works at his father’s restaurant. After witnessing a gang shooting, he realizes that he should sell something that everyone needs other than food. He works his way from selling Uzi’s to thugs to bringing shiploads of AK-47’s to dictators. Though a relentless Interpool agent (Ethan Hawke, playing self as a naïve doofus) hounds him at times, Yuri finds the arms trade to be eerily lucrative.
An atheist-existentialist, Yuri never so much as shrugs at the suggestion that his actions are wrong. He hurls heavy handed lines like "You know who's going to inherit the world? Arms dealers. Because everyone else is too busy killing each other," every thirty seconds or so, in case we forget that he possesses a cynical world-view. He traipses around the world, narrating in monotone about how much profitable arms sales are, people killing each other, not giving a shit, etc.
Nearly every line and character exists solely for the purpose of illustrating a message Niccol isn’t even certain of. Never does the film make a serious attempt at balancing the gloom and doom. Yuri’s trophy wife lives the high life off his blood money, then dubiously insists he quit. Yuri brings coke-head brother (Jared Leto) along for no reason other than that the screenplay needs a martyr. And in case we didn’t think Yuri was bad enough, the vicious Liberian murders his underlings on a whim. There have been Bond films with more layered characters, and I’ve seen a few with Roger Moore.
Lord of War gets a few shots into the 10-ring with some black humor and appropriately grim photography, but results in a total misfire. Someone should send Andrew Niccol a memo explaining that relentless cynicism unopposed results in mere whining; Lord of War whines so loud it could be heard over a volley of the machine guns Yuri uses to pay for his limo.
2 out of 5
# posted by James : 12:25 AM
