Lord of War

Lord of War
Directed by	Andrew Niccol
Written by	Andrew Niccol
Produced by	Nicolas Cage Chris Roberts Andreas Grosch
Starring	Nicolas Cage Bridget Moynahan Ethan Hawke Jared Leto Eamonn Walker
Edited by	Zach Staenberg
Distributed by	Lions Gate Films
Release date	16 September 2005
Running time	122 mins
Country	USA
Languages	English, Ukrainian, Spanish
Budget	US$42 million
Box office	Domestic: $24,149,632 Worldwide: $72,617,068

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, 2005, with the DVD following on January 17, 2006 and the Blu-ray Disc on July 27, 2006. Cage plays the antiheroic protagonist, an illegal arms dealer with similarities to Russian arms dealers Viktor Bout and Leonid Minin. The film was officially endorsed by the human rights group Amnesty International for highlighting the trafficking of weapons by the international arms industry.

Plot

The movie begins with Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) standing in a sea of spent shell casings. The rest of the movie is told in flashback, starting in 1982 and ending in the completion of the opening scene. The opening credits sequence shows a bullet being produced and going through various stages before getting fired through the head of a civilian during a war in Africa.

Through voiceover, Orlov describes how he first became an arms dealer. Yuri and his family came to United States from Ukraine when he was a young boy. His family pretends to be Jewish for favorable immigration conditions to escape the Soviets, and his father ends up becoming a de facto Orthodox Jew (explaining "I like the hat"). His family owns a restaurant, which Yuri sees as providing a necessity as people have to eat. After Yuri sees a Russian Mafia boss kill two would-be assassins, he decides to provide another necessity: guns. He begins his career by selling Uzis.

Yuri partners up with his brother Vitaly (Jared Leto). Before beginning his career, he approaches Simeon Weisz (Ian Holm), a seasoned arms dealer, at an arms convention with a business proposal. Weisz turns him down, dismissing Yuri as an amateur. When Yuri snarks that Weisz sold weapons to both Iran and Iraq during their 1980-88 war, Weisz asks Yuri if he considered that the hope was both countries would lose. Yuri develops multiple identities (complete with appropriate paperwork and ID cards) and paperwork in a security container.

As he grows, Yuri (through voiceover) tells of his first incident with Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke), an Interpol agent who cannot be bought with money. Their first encounter is when Yuri is on the ship Kristol smuggling a shipment of weapons. When he learns that Valentine is on his tail, he changes the name of the ship and paints a different flag on it thanks to Vitaly's quick thinking. His first encounter with Jack Valentine plays out in his favor.

During a business deal with a Bolivian drug lord, Yuri is paid in cocaine instead of cash. He argues, but eventually accepts the payment. Vitaly and he both get high on cocaine, but Vitaly becomes addicted, and Yuri checks him into a rehabilitation center. From that point onward, he conducts his arms business alone.

Shortly afterwards, he begins to court Ava Fontaine (Bridget Moynahan), a model. He books a photo shoot and the entire hotel so that they have the whole area to themselves. After impressing her, they marry, and later have a small child named Nikki.

On the day that Nikki begins to walk, the Soviet Union dissolves. Yuri rushes to Ukraine after watching Gorbachev's Christmas Day 1991 resignation speech on television. He contacts his uncle, Dmitri, a general of the former Soviet Army, and begins buying his tanks and AK-47s to expand his inventory, explaning in detail how the AK-47 is the most reliable automatic weapon in the world. Weisz comes back and attempts to deal with both Yuri and Dimitri, but is rejected by both. Shortly afterwards, Weisz sets up a car bomb, and Dimitri is assassinated.

Yuri moves on to selling arms to the West African dictator of Liberia, André Baptiste (based on Charles Taylor). Baptiste proclaims that Yuri is a "Lord of War", a verbal on the term "Warlord", paying him in blood diamonds. Valentine continues pursuing Yuri, interceding on a deal involving helicopters and missiles but being thwarted by a loophole in international law that does not classify either of them as weapons of war as long as they are shipped separately. After digging through his garbage, he learns that Yuri will be making a cargo run to Sierra Leone. Valentine successfully intercepts the plane, but Yuri makes an emergency landing and gives away all the guns to local villagers before Valentine can detain him. A local police officer wants to kill Yuri and tells Valentine no one would ever know, but Valentine refuses this, saying "I would know." Valentine does handcuff him and keeps him there for 24 hours before being forced to release him. Yuri makes his way back to Monrovia, where Baptiste invites him to kill the captured Weisz, who simply states he came to Liberia to sell weapons to Baptiste's enemies. Yuri is reluctant, but does not tell Baptiste to stop pulling the trigger until he has done so and murdered Weisz. Weisz later appears in a dream and tells Yuri to "take sides".

Valentine keeps Yuri under surveillance, and one day he reveals to Ava that Yuri is a weapons dealer. Ava pleads with Yuri to stop, and he does, instead choosing to exploit the resources of the third world nations. However, he dislikes the business, complaining that the profit margins are low and that there is too much competition compared to illegal arms.

Yuri reenters the arms market when Baptise approaches him. He is reluctant, but goes when Baptise tells him that he will pay more than the usual rate. Yuri decides to bring Vitaly along because he is nervous about the current climate of Liberia. During the transaction, however, Vitaly witnesses a group of villagers beating a mother and her child to death, and tells Yuri the entire village will be massacred if the deal comes through. He pleads with Yuri to stop the transaction, but Yuri says it's not their conflict. Vitaly responds by taking a grenade and blowing up half of the guns. A guard watching the transaction shoots Vitaly to death. Yuri takes his money and leaves; the massacre that Vitaly predicted then takes place.

Yuri ships his brother's body back to the United States with him. He pays someone to remove the lead from Vitaly's body, but one bullet remains and he is stopped by customs. Meanwhile, while being followed by Jack Valentine, Ava finds Yuri's security container, which is definitive proof of Yuri's arms dealing. Ava takes their son and leaves him. When Yuri calls his parents, his mother says, "Both my sons are dead." Valentine detains Yuri and tells him that he has a long jail sentence ahead of him. However, in what many consider the best scene in the movie, Yuri informs Valentine that the reasons Valentine thinks he'll go to prison are the same reasons that he won't. He admits to dealing with horrible people, selling weapons, and providing weapons to some of the world's worst dictators. He then goes on to say that sometimes the people he supplies "are the enemies of your enemies" (the U.S.) and that sometimes the President of the United States needs a "freelancer" like him to supply those that he cannot be seen supplying. He had earlier told him that he'd soon be released, told he'd not be held, by a man in uniform who outranks him. It's Yuri's friend and business partner Colonel Southern. He is then released and proven right. Valentine's only victory in this scene is the way he brings home the implacable point that Yuri is a man with no one, having seen his wife leave him, his parents disown him, and his brother die.

A free man again, he returns to selling arms. The movie ends by proclaiming on-screen that it is "based on actual events," and that the U.S., the UK, France, Russia and China (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council) are the world's leading arms suppliers.

DVD Release

The UK DVD release of Lord of War includes, prior to the film, an advert for Amnesty International, showing the AK-47 being sold on a shopping channel of the style popular on cable networks. The American DVD release includes a bonus feature that shows the various weapons used in the movie, allowing viewers to click on each weapon to get statistics about their physical dimensions and histories.

Reception

Critical

The film received a 61% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It received a special mention for excellence in filmmaking from the National Board of Review. The Movie House summed up the viewpoint of the film's most enthusiastic admirers by saying, "Lord of War is a great movie. If Martin Scorsese had made GoodFellas about arms dealers rather than Mafiosi, and if Scorsese had a much better sense of humor, he would have made a movie very much like this. I don't know if I can give any filmmaker a better compliment than that."

Box office

The film grossed $9,390,144 on its opening weekend (2,814 theaters, $3,336 average). After the film's 7-weeks release it grossed a total of $24,149,632 on the domestic market, and $48,467,436 overseas.

Cast

• Nicolas Cage – Yuri Orlov
• Bridget Moynahan – Ava Fontaine Orlov
• Jared Leto – Vitaly Orlov
• Ethan Hawke – Jack Valentine
• Eamonn Walker – André Baptiste Sr.
• Sammi Rotibi – André Baptiste Jr.
• Ian Holm – Simeon Weisz
• Yevgeni Lazarev – Gen. Dmitri Orlov

External links

• Official site
• Lord of War at IMDb
• Lord of War at Rotten Tomatoes
• Lord of War at Box Office Mojo