Lord of War

Lord of War is a fucking disaster. It's shitty in as many different ways as the port-a-potties at a multi-cultural festival. I mean, on the surface this is a technically competent movie. There is nothing obviously wrong with it, like a snuff scene in the middle, or Rob Schneider in his underwear. But it's such bad storytelling and so self-serving that I wouldn't recommend it to anyone except people whose political activism goes no farther than a "Free Tibet" bumper sticker.

Watching Lord of War is like hearing a know-it-all at a party tell you he read a "fascinating" article about weapons traders in Harper's. First, the asshole wants you to know he reads Harper's. Second, he acts like a fucking authority on the subject because he read one story once. Third, he can't remember any of the specifics that made the story "fascinating". All he really remembers is that he read the article, had some sense of outrage at the moral corruption of men who sell weapons, and now wants you to know he was outraged. He didn't want to do anything about it. He just wanted you to admire how mad he was that poor people are dying.

The guy is an asshole. So are the writer, director, stars and producers of the self-serving hot-shit sandwich titled Lord of War. This is the most didactic, boring-ass self-serving piles of horseshit the Hollywood grassfuckers have put out in a long time. The entire thing reeks of more vanity and fake morality than the Crystal Cathedral. And it assumes the audience is so fucking ignorant that we aren't aware of the gun trade. Well, no shit there are people supplying weapons to war-torn nations and brutal dictators. Before he made this, did Niccol think they were making guns out of mud? Did he think the people selling the guns were sweethearts? What has he added to the discussion besides factoids?

The movie, in its stupidity, thinks the way to make its obvious lecture palatable is to star Nicolas Cage and make pathetic attempts at the occasional comic moment. What a fucking atonal mess. It's a lecture! No, it's a comedy! Either way it's overly simplistic and geared to people inclined to feel the same fake outrage as the makers.

Cage is miscast as a Ukrainian-born arms dealer from Brighton Beach. They never specifically say he's a vampire, but that's the only way his character could possibly span the story's twenty years of the story without ever aging. Fuck, nobody in this story ages. The movie glosses over what would be the most interesting part. That is, how does a good kid become a world class arms dealer and lose his soul? Cage just does. And throughout the whole fucking movie he narrates a cavalcade of know-it-all factoids and plot points in tiresome voice-over that only illustrate how much better all of this probably was in Harper's. I mean, every fucking scene has him saying stupid-ass shit over it. The sort of stuff that a full-of-shit writer/director Andrew Niccol fall in love because he thinks it makes him look smart, like "Every man has his price. But it doesn't mean he'll get it." That kind of nonsense that sounds real smart and clever, but really isn't. It's just there to please the assholes who made this turd. Get over yourselves, fucker, and entertain us. If you've got a message, sneak it in there. Don't overwhelm us with your phony sense of morality.

Anyway, Cage travels the world selling guns, tanks and aircraft to both sides of every illegal war. The point of Lord of War is not to tell a story, but rather to lecture us about the evils of gun runners and how battles are supplied. Maybe that's an interesting story, but not here. Especially told with this much self-righteous indignation and obviousness. And from the point of view of a lead character who is supposed to amuse us with his glibness at the same time we're supposed to be appalled by his, well, glibness. Like I said, it's like hearing some of the facts from a know-it-all asshole who can't remember the good details, and tells it more to show off than anything else.

There is a half-assed plot somewhere in there about a trophy wife in New York whom he keeps his arms dealing a secret from, and whom he claims to love despite fucking women in every foreign country. And Ethan Hawke plays a bad-toothed Interpol agent hot on his trail. None of this amounts to anything, and mostly gets in the way of the voice-overs and fetishized scenes of gunpiles.

The movie's morality is totally undermined by Niccol's own showiness. I think back to The Constant Gardener, which had a genuine empathy for the poor in Africa and a real sense of the cost of lives. In that movie, when the camera focused on the poor it was to remind us that they were the real victims, not the movie stars carrying the story. Here, when the camera focuses on the poor, it's a fucking fraud. Niccol thinks they are simply props for his big fake lecture. There is no compassion or pity there. Just a director getting his nuts off.

And he gets his nuts off with the same guns and explosions he is lecturing us about. What a fucking solipsistic Hollywood asshole. Honestly, a movie like this makes me think that those grassfuckers don't even realize that the other 99.9% of the world isn't a huge set. This is shit. Lord of War getsOne Finger for its self-serving cynical bullshit. Fuck it.