Lord of War

Lord of War
File:Lord of War film.jpg Lord of War film poster
Directed by	Andrew Niccol
Written by	Andrew Niccol
Produced by	Nicolas Cage, Chris Roberts, Andreas Grosch
Starring	Nicolas Cage, Jared Leto, Ethan Hawke
Distributed by	Lions Gate Films
Release date	16 September 2005
Running time	122 minutes
Language	English
Budget	~ US$42,000,000

Lord of War is a 2005 film written and directed by Andrew Niccol and starring Nicolas Cage. It was released in the United States on September 16.

Cage's character bears a striking similarity to Victor Bout. Some also believe that he is based at least partially on Marc Rich. Eamonn Walker's character (André Baptiste Sr.) is believed to be based on Charles Taylor.

The DVD was released on January 17, 2006 in the USA.

Plot

• Tagline: Where there's a will, there's a weapon.

The movie begins with Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) matter-of-factly stating, "There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That's one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other 11?" The opening credits then follow the journey of one bullet from a munitions assembly line in Odessa, U.S.S.R. to the head of a small African boy.

The rest of the movie is told in flashback, starting in the 1980s and ending to where he is now.

Through voiceover, Yuri Orlov describes how he first became an arms dealer. Yuri and his family came to the U.S. from Ukraine as a young boy. His family pretends to be Jewish for favorable immigration conditions. His family owns a restaurant, which is useful, because it is necessary for people to eat. After Yuri sees a Russian Mafia boss kill his two would-be assassins, he decides to provide another necessity: guns.

He partners up with his brother, Vitaly (Jared Leto), and begins selling arms. Yuri keeps his multiple identities and paperwork in a security container. It starts small and begins with him selling US M-16 rifles they left behind from the 1982 Lebanon War. As he grows, Yuri (through voiceover) tells of his first incident with Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke) , a dogged Interpol agent who can't be bought with money. The first encounter in the movie is when Yuri is on the ship Kristol smuggling a shipment of weapons, including M16s. He gets a call stating that the authorities have been tipped off; Yuri changes the ship name to the Kono and uses a French flag turned sideways to seem like a Dutch flag, and the first encounter with Jack Valentine smoothly plays out in Yuri's favor.

Before beginning his carreer in earnest, he approaches Simeon Weisz, a more experienced arms dealer, at an arms convention with a business proposal. Weisz turns him down, dismissing him as an amateur. Yuri moves onto selling arms to the West African dictator of Liberia, André Baptiste (based on Charles Taylor).

During his latest business deal with a Colombian drug lord, Yuri is paid in cocaine instead of cash. Yuri objects, is shot in the heated exchange, agrees to the deal, and leaves in a taxi with the load of cocaine. Vitaly is unsure of what to do next and asks Yuri what to do. Yuri answers by saying "let's celebrate". They both end up snorting cocaine, but Vitaly becomes addicted, and Yuri takes him to a rehabilitation center. From then on, Yuri conducts the arms business alone. Shortly thereafter, he begins to court Ava Fontaine, a successful and pretty model. After booking a fake photo shoot for $20,000 and the entire hotel for $12,000 he successfully courts her and they later marry and have a son.

His business is still relatively small, but finally Yuri gets his big break when the Soviet Union dissolves. He contacts his uncle, Dimitri, who is a general in the Ukrainian army, and buys his tanks and AK-47s to ramp up his business. Meanwhile, Interpol agent Jack Valentine stalks Yuri, nearly catching him when Yuri is loading weaponry, along with an old model MI-24 "Hind" onto a Russian ship bound for Burkina Faso. Fortunately, Yuri discovers a loophole in the law banning the export of military helicopters — if unarmed and converted to civilian use, their export is not prohibited. The weapons are removed and shipped separately. Valentine growls about the loopholes and vows that they will be closed, but has no choice but to release Yuri.

Shortly after this, Dimitri is assassinated by a car bomb — compliments of Weisz. Jack Valentine continues his pursuit of Yuri, confident that he will eventually slip up. Jack doggedly searches the garbage of the Orlov household. After painstakingly reconstructing a dumpster full of Yuri's shredded documents he discovers that Yuri will soon be making a cargo run to Sierra Leone.

Yuri's cargo plane is intercepted by an L-39 fighter jet. Yuri instructs the pilot to land the plane on a dirt road, knowing the fighter will not be able to land there. After landing safely, and having been deserted by the plane's crew, he gives the entire shipment of arms away to passers-by. When Jack Valentine finally arrives, the plane is empty, and there is no evidence of the arms shipment. Jack deliberately keeps Yuri detained for twenty-four hours (the longest detention allowed without charge), before he is forced to release him, because, as he argues, any delay in the arms trade saves lives. Yuri is just left unguarded in the wild for 24 hours with handcuffs on. In the meantime, all removable parts of the plane are stripped off by locals.

By now, Yuri has established a very good relationship with André Baptiste, but is horrified when Baptiste captures Weisz as a "present." Baptiste invites Yuri to kill Weisz. When Yuri refuses, Baptiste puts the gun in his hand while slowly pulling the trigger himself. Yuri is invited to say "stop" at any time, but only says it after the shot. Soon after this incident, Yuri sniffs "brown-brown," a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder, and becomes extremely intoxicated by the mixture. At a point in his delerium, he has sex with a prostitute, despite the uncomfortably high probablity that she is HIV positive.

Jack keeps Yuri under surveillance, and reveals to Ava that Yuri is an arms dealer. At first, she does not believe him, but begins to realize the truth. Ava confronts him about his business, and he promises that he will stop. He makes more legal deals to exploit the resources of poor nations, but complains that the margins are low and competition is high. A year later, Baptiste and his son come over and visit Yuri (they are heading to the United Nations) with another arms deal offer. Yuri initially refuses, but when Baptiste indicates that he will be much more generous than usual, Yuri relents.

He takes Vitaly along to the deal, which turns out to be in Sierra Leone. However, during the deal, Vitaly becomes distressed: he sees men kill a mother and child in a nearby village of unarmed civilians and tells Yuri that their customers will kill all the villagers right after Yuri sells the weapons. He pleads with Yuri to cancel the shipment. Yuri, who goes by the slogan, "It's not our battle," tries to convince him that someone else will sell the weapons if they don't; he also argues that both of them will be killed if they try to cancel the deal. Vitaly pretends to agree. But in a bold act, he takes two grenades and destroys half of Yuri's shipments; the guards then kill Vitaly. Of the incident, Yuri says that it was true that the village dwellers were massacred after he handed the weapons over, but, "There were half a dozen other massacres that week. They say that 'evil prevails when good men fail to act.' It ought to be 'evil prevails.'"

Yuri ships his brother's remains back to the United States. He pays someone to remove the bullets from Vitaly's body, but one bullet remains, and Yuri is stopped by customs. Meanwhile, Ava has found Yuri's security container, and turns it over to Jack Valentine, who finally has the definitive proof to imprison Yuri. Ava takes their son and leaves him. When Yuri calls his parents, his mother says, "Both my sons are dead." Valentine tells Yuri that he has a long jail sentence ahead of him, but Yuri abruptly brings him back to reality. In a bold statement, he proclaims that the President of the United States indirectly supports him, and that Yuri does transactions that the United States cannot publicly associate itself with. He tells Valentine that there will be a knock at the door, and that a high ranking military officer will be standing outside, and that he will order Yuri's release. A few seconds later, there is a knock at the door, and events proceed as Yuri predicted.

A free man again, and without his family and friends, he returns to selling arms. In the closing scene of the film, he is in North Africa and gives two guards a packaging slip for a shipment of umbrellas. "Umbrellas? In the Sahara?" one guard asks incredulously. "Sun umbrellas," Yuri says. The guards lift up the slip — revealing a plush bribe — and both guards immediately wave them through. The movie ends by proclaiming that the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia and China (the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council) are the world's leading arms dealers and ends with, "This film is based on actual events.", as the camera rolls over thousands of bullets (symbolistic of all the weapons Yuri has sold) until they fade away and the credits pursue.

In the movie, Orlov has three rules in Gun Running...

1.) Never get shot with your own merchandise. 2.) Always have a fool proof way to get paid. 3.) Never pick up a gun and join your customer.

Trivia

• There is a real Yuri Orlov who, ironically, is a human rights activist.

Firearms

-Uzi Submachine Gun

-M16

-Glock Pistol

-Colt Pylon

-M60 (Gun of Rambo)

-AK-47

-MP5

This list is incomplete.

Cast

• Nicolas Cage – Yuri Orlov
• Ethan Hawke – Jack Valentine
• Jared Leto – Vitaly Orlov
• Eamonn Walker – André Baptiste
• Bridget Moynahan – Ava Fontaine
• Ian Holm – Simeon Weisz

External links

• Official site
• Lord of War at IMDb