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Saw this Wednesday night, but hadn't gotten a chance to post the review yet...



Lord of War (Andrew Niccol)

Very disappointing if slick flick about an international arms dealer that isn't anywhere near as insightful or darkly funny as it thinks it is. Nic Cage plays a young man of Ukranian immigrants in the Little Odessa neighborhood of Brooklyn. His parents and brother seem content toiling in the restaurant trade, but he has bigger aspirations: gunrunning. He starts small, but by the time the Soviet Union collapses in the early 1990s, he becomes extremely successful selling arms and munitions to vitrually anybody for any kind of conflict all over the globe, with his biggest market being the perpetually wartorn African countries. He becomes extremely wealthy and even snares the extremely beautiful trophy bride he has dreamed of since High School. Yadda-yadda, dealing with dangerous men in dangerous zones is dangerous, and it is a soulless enterprise. Real shocker.

Unfortunately Lord of War isn't the sharp and extremely black comedy it might have been. Nor is it a burning indicment of this shady business that a more documentarian approach may have yielded (Lord of War is based, however loosely, on a real arms dealer). What's left it a little of both, but not enough of either. Too bad. It's a subject that's probably ripe for either wicked satire or a probing exposé.

There's some slick filmmaking going in in Lord of War, but despite the subject matter there is sadly little to sink one's teeth into. A much better movie with some overlapping themes and issues is The Constant Gardener, which you would do much better to throw your money at. I will say Lord of War is miles better than Billy Friedkin's godawful dull mess Deal of the Century (1983), which back in the early '80s tried to be a comedy with similar material (which I would unreservedly grade an "F"). THAT movie is unwatchable and painfully dull. Lord of War isn't unwatchable, but it is a severely disappointing.


GRADE: C