Lord of War

Well, I wouldn’t say that Lord of War was necessarily the happiest movie I have ever seen, but it was definitely one of the better ones I have viewed lately. Similar in some ways to The Constant Gardener in that the citizens of Africa are portrayed as dispensable, in this film they are the casualties of ruthless warlords as opposed to expendable subjects for drug testing. I once again left the theater feeling disturbed by the callousness with which the African people are treated and had a lot to think about in the car ride home.

Lord of War begins at the end, where Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) begins narrating the story of his life as an extremely successful international arms dealer. He describes the events from an objective and dispassionate standpoint, which mirrors his character’s ability to completely detach himself from any morals that would impair his ability to sell guns to a dubious clientele. From Yuri’s perspective, guns are a basic human as essential as food, and he simply provides the people with what they want, calling himself an equal opportunity merchant of death. He enters into the business with his brother, Vitaly Orlov (Jared Leto), and the two are quite successful at their trade, possessing an innate ability to play dangerous cat and mouse games with international officials and avoid capture. Yuri pays off any government agent who can possibly be bought, but he has to constantly outwit or sneak by a particularly overzealous inspector, Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke), whose ethics cannot be compromised. Valentine is obsessed with catching Yuri but won’t break the law in order to do it, which ironically allows Yuri to hide behind the laws that he makes a living breaking.

Yuri’s best client is the Liberian President, Andre Baptiste (Sammi Rotibi), who is the worst of all African warlords. Yuri doesn’t particularly like Baptiste, or any of his clients for that matter, but is willing to do business with him while turning a blind eye to the massacres in front of him. At one point, he brings a shipment of guns to some of Baptiste’s soldiers on the outskirts of an African settlement, knowing that the instant the transaction is completed the guns will be used to massacre the residents of the nearby colony. His motto in these instances is, “it’s not my fight,” which he constantly repeats to himself in order to assure his conscience that he is not really responsible for the deaths caused by his weapons. To him, the sound of gunfire literally sounds like a cash machine.

The movie makes a statement about ethics and morals, as well as the culpability of the U.S. government in actually encouraging gunrunning as a necessary evil. The filmmakers focus on Yuri’s character, as the story is told from his first-hand perspective, but it’s not simply a story of one man’s business in gun trafficking. It was a very interesting movie with excellent characters, and while it was certainly a dark story, I really enjoyed watching it. I definitely recommend that you see it, especially if you enjoy character-driven political movies that leave you with something to think about afterward.