Lord of War
''Lord of War," Andrew Niccol's gunrunning drama, literally starts off with a bang. The film's opening credits, scored to Buffalo Springfield's ''For What It's Worth," are shot from the point of view of a bullet as it makes its way from a Russian factory to a loading dock, to another loading dock, to a truck heading into the jungle, to a remote village, to the clip of a gun, to the barrel of the gun and, finally, into the brain of an anonymous young African man. He may be a killer himself or he may be an innocent. The bullet doesn't care.
It's one of the most visually arresting and morally loaded opening sequences I've ever seen, and the surprise is that it's in a Nicolas Cage movie. The star plays Yuri Orlov, a Brooklyn-bred immigrant's son who rises to the top of the illegal arms trade during the 1980s and '90s. We're meant to take Yuri as a likable Satan, a businessman. Early on, he tells us, ''There are 550 million firearms in circulation around the globe, one for every 12 people. The only question is: How do we arm the other 11?"
''Lord of War" is advocacy entertainment -- an act of mainstream provocation -- and, for the most part, it works unusually well. Like ''The Constant Gardener," like ''Beyond Borders" and ''Tears of the Sun" (both 2003), the movie wants to shake you up and make you mad enough to do something, but unlike other filmmakers, Niccol (''Gattaca") has the skill to get you dramatically involved and thinking at the same time. His outrage is balanced by a storyteller's native interest in what his characters will do next.
He has in Yuri a charming reptile of an antihero, a child of the go-go '80s willing to sell his soul for the chance to strut on a worldwide stage. The character narrates his own story with a playful cynicism that's tinged with Cage's own oddball inflections, and Niccol's dialogue is packed with glibly nasty epigrams. ''I was an equal opportunity merchant of death," Yuri casually brags. ''I sold to every army except the Salvation Army." That line gets a laugh, and the laugh jams in your throat.
We see him slowly rise to success from a small-time wannabe who haunts international gun fairs; the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 is the break he's been waiting for. Yuri joyously kisses the images on TV not from love of freedom but because of the millions of used AK-47s he knows are about to hit the black market. Soon he's in business with his Uncle Dmitri (Eugene Lazarev), a former Soviet colonel with an arms stockpile in Ukraine.
There are rivals, among them the graying master gun merchant Simeon Weisz (Ian Holm). Yuri's enemies include a Dudley Do-Right of an Interpol agent named Jack Valentine, played by Ethan Hawke as if he's still stoked up from the last Amnesty International meeting. That's a compliment, actually; Hawke has to deliver the film's preachiest dialogue but he puts it across with an enjoyably hot-wired righteousness.
Dropping in and out of the proceedings is Yuri's kid brother Vitaly (Jared Leto), a business partner until cocaine and a conscience get in the way. Yuri has a wife, too, a gorgeous, vapid supermodel named Eva (Bridget Moynahan) who stays in Manhattan and never asks questions. So, yes, we have a little bit of Fredo from ''The Godfather" here, and a lot of Michelle Pfeiffer from ''Scarface" -- ''Lord of War" isn't shy about wearing its influences where you can see them.
Niccol leaves these shopworn characters in America and increasingly sends Yuri to African dictatorships, where his Russian firearms find ready buyers in Liberian president Andre Baptiste (Eamonn Walker, his role a fictionalized take on General Charles Taylor). These scenes start hellishly and turn more so, as Yuri loses what few moral bearings he has and the demons start closing in. In one startling image, he wanders distraught through the African night and encounters a pair of immense hyenas. Why don't they take a bite? Like the joke says, professional courtesy.
Are we supposed to feel sorry for this man? Of course not, but at times Niccol gets too close for comfort, only to finally pull back into easy speechifying and finger-pointing at certain world leaders and weapons industries. Until that point, some may think the film shares Yuri's joie de mort; the naive may think we're supposed to share it. Isn't it refreshing, though, when a director trusts audiences to do the moral arithmetic themselves? Yuri isn't an especially deep character -- that's the movie's biggest flaw -- but the buttons he pushes reach deep enough to do the trick. Niccol gives the devil his due and then kicks the matter back to us.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.
Video
