Take Five
By George Rose
August 11, 2009
Lord of War (2005) – watched/written on August 5, 2009
Tonight's plans fell through, and tomorrow there is another festival in a nearby village, so my brother and I decided to watch another movie today and rest our livers. Since many of the DVDs I borrowed from my friend are, shall we say "borrowed" as well (cough cough burned discs with sticker labels on top cough cough), my computer has been overheating (from the thick labels) and freezing up. To avoid such interruptions, I'm now trying to watch only the legitimate DVDs. One of them is Lord of War. It's appropriate since the movie is about illegal arms trading. Though I have no weapons, I'm not sure the MPAA would approve of the DVD case I'm carrying around.
Nicolas Cage stars as Yuri Orlav, a man trying to make a not-so-honest living selling guns. The beginning of the movie follows his early rise into becoming a dealer, along with his younger brother Vitaly (Jared Leto). It's entertaining at first as we learn about the gun trade, especially with Yuri's narration which is full of clever plays-on-words. With Leto, you feel this might rise above B-movie boredom and dabble into a character piece with insight into real global concerns. By the time Ava (Bridget Moynahan), a super model and the future Mrs. Yuri Orlav, and the predictable pesky agent (Ethan Hawke) come along, you realize this is just a much less interesting version of Blow, albeit with guns instead of cocaine and Nic Cage instead of Johnny Depp. Neither swap is beneficial to the final product.
I had hoped for more, given the cast, but the movie was far too long for its own good. At around two hours, it could have been bumped up a whole letter grade if the second act were cut out all together. Even director Andrew Niccol seemed to have given up entirely by the end. Maybe it was the weak script, but I think even cliché characters like the drugged-up younger brother, the miserable pampered wife and the too-good-to-work-outside-the-law agent deserve better than being shot to death, walking out of the house just as the phone rings for help, and the inability to convict the criminal because of a corrupt government. Like the movie's length, everything that makes it up is just so played out. My brother and I were writing this script just before it was all happening.
Instead we were offered declining narration that was overloaded with alliteration ("catalogue of carnage"? Yaaaaawn) and a montage after Yuir snorts some bad Brown Brown (cocaine mixed with gun powder). A kid without an arm! Yuri sleeps with a hooker! Hyenas! Is the high over yet? The entire two hours was like the intro to Iron Man, a much better movie that realized a story like this only requires twenty minutes to tell. Sadly, its effect was closer to Cage's boring Ghost Rider. I would have rather forced myself to go out tonight and make another drunk dial mistake than watch this letdown of a movie. Well, maybe not, but there's always the festival tomorrow for that to happen.
Overall Rating: D+
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