Thursday 29 April 2010

Lord of War (2005)

(SPOILER ALERT: DO NOT READ THIS POST IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHO GETS CAUGHT)

[The following Bust was prompted by a question about whether the plot was based on real events. It wasn't, but the story was inspired by a pair of real (unrelated) arms traders.]

Lord of War (2005) is a political crime thriller written and directed by Andrew Niccol, starring Nicolas Cage and Ethan Hawke.

In the end Nicolas Cage if freed to continue his shameful trade in illegal arms.

Witnessing a Russian mobster killing two would-be assassins in a Brighton Beach restaurant, Ukranian immigrant Cage is struck by a sudden and rather questionable flash of inspiration, that just as restaurants service a basic human need to eat, arms dealers service the need to wage war.

As none of his New York family are making much from their culinary skills, Cage sees his knack for creative reasoning as a way to make a success in trading arms.

Right from his very first sale of a single automatic weapon to a local hoodlum, Cage demonstrates the quick witted persuasiveness, that will time after time get him out of the tricky situations he finds himself in.

But realising that the profit margins of dealing guns to domestic criminals isn't going to get him where he wants to be, Cage sees the international conflict market as the road to success.

Indeed, international conflict also proves to be his first wholesale source of merchandise, as he begins redistributing the arms Uncle Sam considers too expensive to repatriate once its forces have left a theatre of operation.

Unfortunately for Cage, his brother has trouble coming to terms with the inevitable consequences of the murderous trade Cage from the start persuaded him to join.

So when one of their South American deals is settled in cocaine rather than cash, his brother acquires an addiction which renders him useless as a business partner.

Tragically, it is only much later, when Cage is desperate for his brother's help in completing a transaction that he would rather not have gotten involved with, that his brother is killed following an attack of conscience, having kicked his habit, that forces him to try to thwart the deal.

In the meantime, however, the fall of the Soviet Union allows Cage to go into business with another relative, his Ukranian General uncle. And business booms as Cage now has access to everything the mothballed Russian Army has to offer.

Unfortunately for his uncle though, on his rise to success, Cage has made a serious enemy of one old school and rather bigoted arms dealer. So, when Cage and his uncle insultingly reject an offer to work together with him, the dealer mistakenly blows up the uncle in Cage's place. Cage will eventually avenge his uncle's death, but only by having one of his Central African despot clients help him pull the trigger.

The authorities, at least in the shape of one zealous, straight-laced and persistent (and completely unrealistic) Interpol agent, played by Ethan Hawke, are well aware of Cage's activities, but are seemingly incapable of catching him in the act.

It is rather ironic then that it is the fabulously beautiful woman, another Brighton Beach immigrant made good, who Cage's wealth has allowed him to woo, marry and start a family with, that eventually leads Hawke to the evidence that aught to bring Cage to justice.

But, of course, all the evidence in the world is not going to convict Cage, who, by dint of the clandestine work he does for the US by arming the enemies of its enemies, is freed to carry on his dirty trade alone, now that all those still alive in his family have disowned him.


It is remarkable that a drama constructed from such worthy material as opposition to illegal arms trading, should be as entertaining as it is.

If some of the plot twists seem a little too convenient to ring true, and if Cage's rather stilted voice over seems to rather over rationalise his chosen profession, it is hard not get caught up in Hawke's pursuit of justice, and the innocent lives of those surrounding Cage.

The ending may be cynical in the extreme, but the impact of the movie's opening title sequence, that follows the life journey of a bullet from its shop-floor birth in a Ukranian arms factory to its eventual death in the brain of an African teenage boy fighter, is hard to ignore.

Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_War