(Credit: www.DVDTown.com)
Writer/Director:
Andrew Niccol
Cast:
Nicolas Cage……….Yuri Orlov
Ethan Hawke……….Valentine
Bridget Moynahan……….Ava Fontaine
Jared Leto……….Vitaly Orlov
Ian Holm……….Simeon Weisz
Eamonn Walker……….Baptiste Senior
Sammi Rotibi……….Baptiste Junior
Lions Gate Films presents Lord of War. Running time: 122 minutes. Rated R (for strong violence, drug use, language and sexuality).
The movie:
Yuri Orlov is a regular Sears and Roebuck. His business is guns and all sorts of firearm paraphernalia. But he doesn’t own a gun shop, and he’s not a magazine representative for Guns N’ Ammo. No, Yuri is an international arms dealer.
At first glance you do not see an arms dealer. A successful man of business, maybe. He stands in the middle of the road, of some war torn nation, with bullets strewn about the ground. He turns and looks directly at the camera and the audience and says, “There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That’s one firearm per every 12 people. The only question is: How do we arm the other eleven?”
So it begins. Lord of War is a bleak comedy (or is it satire?) and also an outcry about the real WMDs: guns. An arms dealer is not an easy person to spot. It’s not like one goes prancing around door-to-door offering guns like they were Girl Scout cookies. Though, when talking about astute gunrunners, they don’t go door-to-door. They go war-to-war.
Yuri is played by the ever-so-versatile Nicolas Cage. It’s a performance that not many actors could play so effectively; he’s an immigrant from Ukraine who is living with his parents and brother in Little Odessa, New York. His own personal hell. Not to be discouraged, Yuri has dreams of leaving the family business – not the Mob, but a small restaurant – to find his own path to success. Self-assured and confident, Yuri uses his effervescent charm and intellect to gain a foothold in the gunrunning business. While doing so, he narrates his steady climb as an arms dealer until he gets in too deep.
Always on the ATF’s watch list, but not for alcohol or tobacco, Yuri had a natural gift at smuggling contraband. Thank goodness for bulky camcorders in the 1980s. The suitcases they were housed in made for easy transportation. Gunrunning is an operation similar to that of a small business. Competitors are few, but noteworthy. Success is dependent upon the product you can offer and your list of clientele. Another contributing factor in success is the political unrest around the world. Business can be booming when war is occurring. When peace between two warring nations is imminent, though, business declines. “There’s nothing more expensive for an arms dealer than peace,” Yuri says.
The art of the sale is also key. According to our narrator, “Selling guns is like selling vacuum cleaners. Pound the pavement.” Convincing dictators and warlords to buy your merchandise can be tricky. Men who usurp and overthrow governments are looking for the most bang for their buck. What better way than going through a man who sells to “every army but the Salvation Army”? Yuri has clients all over the world. Western Europe, the Middle East, even the United States.
His biggest customers reside in West Africa: The Liberian dictator Baptiste Senior (Eamonn Walker) and his son Baptiste Junior (Sammi Rotibi). Senior shoots people on a whim, including a negligent aide, during their first meeting together. The gun used by Senior just happened to be a piece Yuri was in the process of selling. “Now you’ll have to buy it, because it’s a used gun.” If you can find the humor in this joke, then you’ll understand the straight-faced salesman etiquette of Yuri Orlov.
When he’s not busying himself buying up huge caches of black market firearms in post-Cold War Ukraine, Yuri lives the life of luxury in Manhattan. He’s married to Ava Fontaine (Bridget Moynahan), a former cover girl, and a woman he’s loved since childhood. They have a little boy and live in a lush, grand apartment. Their relationship, at first, is filled with love and compassion, as well as lies and deception. Yuri tells her he’s in the international shipping business and Ava believes him, or pretends to anyway. Years pass and the marriage disintegrates to the point where it’s just an arms dealer alone in his wonderful abode.
Lord of War is part provocative thriller and part how-to video on the art of gunrunning. The thriller aspect comes from the cat and mouse game Yuri plays with an Interpol agent named Valentine (Ethan Hawke). Just when Valentine gets the upper hand, Yuri slips away. The film is similar in vein to Martin Scorsese’s mob epics, especially with the narration and how an immoral person goes about his business. There’s even a scene where Yuri Orlov is being followed by a helicopter, much like Ray Liotta’s character in Goodfellas. Intentional or not, it was a nice, little reference.
Andrew Niccol (The Truman Show, Gattaca) is the man at the helm of Lord of War. It seems that Niccol makes a film whenever it involves a popular or newsworthy subject. The Truman Show, which he wrote the screenplay for, was released just as reality programming was starting to make a dent in prime-time television. Gattaca, an underrated sci-fi gem, was released the same year British scientists were creating Dolly the sheep. So, it goes without question that his newest project is his take on an ever-changing world. With debates raging on about the war in Iraq and the U.S. government’s inability to locate weapons of destruction, there is a world where kids twelve and younger act as freedom fighters. Where warlords accelerate revolutions with the help of arms dealers. Maybe that is why Interpol agents like Ethan Hawke’s character are so indispensable. If they can save lives, if only for a moment, by closing down an arms dealer’s operation, then it’s a good day.
Score: 9/10
The DVD:
VIDEO: How does it look?
(Presented in 1.78:1 Anamorphic Widescreen)
Here again is another example with the studio tinkering with the aspect ratio. For the DVD release, the film’s original aspect ratio (2.35:1) has been altered. I don’t know why, but the production company agreed to the altered ratio. The funny thing about this discrepancy is that the deleted scenes on disc 2 are presented in the correct aspect ratio. Having seen the film in theaters, back in September, I didn’t notice a big a difference. Though, sometimes I forget the days of the week. There seems to be a bit more headroom than there should, but the image does not look cropped. The transfer itself is almost flawless. There are instances with dirt or grain in the print, but not much. Everything from the exotic locales to the production shoot in Cape Town looks excellent.
Score: 8/10
AUDIO: How does it sound?
(6.1 DTS-ES Digital Audio; 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround EX)
It’s pretty special when a film that earns roughly 24 million at the box office is afforded a 6.1 audio track. Maybe it’s because Lord of War has Jerry Bruckheimer production values. Andrew Niccol worked with a few of the sound designers who worked on The Matrix; so, yeah the sound is not a problem. Add that to the use of eclectic songs by Buffalo Springfield, David Bowie, and Eric Clapton, and you have a very entertaining soundtrack.
Score: 9/10
SPECIAL FEATURES: Director’s commentary, deleted scenes and featurettes.
If you view the one-disc version of Andrew Niccol’s film on DVD, the only extra you are treated to is a commentary track. Over the course of two hours, Niccol talks about directing and the production. It’s actually quite interesting. Most of the film was shot in South Africa, so he and the crew had the task to make Cape Town look like an Eastern Europe country. The scene where Yuri is switching the guns on a helicopter gunship next to a freighter was actually shot in Cape Town. They had to change the lighting, adding more blue to the color, to make it look the same with the other exterior scenes that were shot in the Czech Republic. There are more stories about shooting in Africa. For one particular scene they had to pay off the gang of a village so that they could film there. The gang acted as security during the shoot. Strange, but true.
The second disc of the two-disc special edition has a short supply of extras. Not sure why they couldn’t go on the first disc, but I’m assuming it had to do with space occupied by the 6.1 and 5.1 audio tracks.
The first thing you notice about Lord of War is that it is wall-to-wall guns. In the feature The Making of Lord of War, Andrew Niccol and his lead star had to get inside the head of an arms dealer. The director went as far as to meet a few. For twenty minutes you get a behind-the-scenes look at the production that went into creating Niccol’s latest feature film. Sound bites from Cage and other crewmembers are intercut with footage shot while in production. You’ll learn all sorts of trivial facts like how 3000 AK-47’s were bought for the film. Special attention is paid to the cinematographer and production designer and the message of the film.
The other featurette is a 15-minute piece entitled Making a Killing: Inside the International Arms Trade. Here, experts talk about the trafficking of small arms in foreign countries. A staggering statistic is that 250 million small arms and light weapons are in the United States. Compare that to the 30 million in Africa or 84 million in Europe. But the damage inflicted in a country like Libya or South Africa is far greater than that of the U.S. There’s more of a human interest. Unlike many featurettes on DVDs, this one talks about the subject at hand. It doesn’t go into exhaustive detail about arms dealing, but there is a segment about Charles Taylor, and how he became the model warlord of how to take over a country with small arms.
The seven deleted scenes (totaling a little over 6 minutes) are small deletions from the final cut of the film. There is no director’s commentary option when viewing the deletions, so you can come up with your own opinions on why they were cut. Some of the scenes are repetitive, giving us too much information, or they are merely extensions of scenes they precede or follow.
Besides a trailer gallery for a number of Lionsgate Film releases and a photo gallery, the only other worthwhile special feature is Weapons of the Trade. With this extra you can access the history and specs for eight different weapons. Highlights include the AK-47; Glock 19; M16; M240 and the UZI.
Score: 6/10
