Lord of War

Lions Gate Films | Release Date: September 16, 2005

8.5	USER SCORE Universal acclaim based on 498 Ratings

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HealingToolboxDec 3, 2020

Thank You for Smoking meets Blood Diamonds. A daunting narrative task. Too long. Very mixed reviews by both pros and users tells me 1-2 scenes should have been deleted. It lacks too much humanity in its parody-meets-inconvenient-truths toThank You for Smoking meets Blood Diamonds. A daunting narrative task. Too long. Very mixed reviews by both pros and users tells me 1-2 scenes should have been deleted. It lacks too much humanity in its parody-meets-inconvenient-truths to be a long movie. Acting is very good. Cage, Monihan, Leto are at their best. The real stand-out performances for me are the father son duo of Liberia. Good production values. My guess is this project had too little adult supervision at the script stage. Selling a hard look at a forbidden, ugly social, political cultural truth would need a stronger story sense to create a commercial hit.… Expand

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MovieMasterEddyApr 3, 2016

"Lord of War," a misfire of a political satire about the international gun market, opens with a killer scene: Nicolas Cage standing on a veritable carpet of bullet casings. Mr. Cage's character, Yuri Orlov, is a gunrunner who has placed"Lord of War," a misfire of a political satire about the international gun market, opens with a killer scene: Nicolas Cage standing on a veritable carpet of bullet casings. Mr. Cage's character, Yuri Orlov, is a gunrunner who has placed untold weapons in untold numbers of hands. Now, surrounded by gutted buildings and dressed to impress, a cigarette burning between his fingers, Yuri looks straight into the camera and wonders aloud how he can furnish everyone in the world with a gun to call his very own.

This carpet of casings also serves as a launching pad for a subsequent and even more outlandish opening credit sequence that tracks a bullet from its manufacture in Russia to its final resting place in the skull of a young African. A bullet in the head always seizes the imagination or at least the audience's attention, but because the African is merely cinematic collateral damage, the image registers both as showboating and as a warning shot for the problems to come. The screenwriter for "Lord of War," Andrew Niccol, lavishes a great deal of time and many words building a case against guns; unfortunately, the film's director, who also happens to be Mr. Niccol, enjoys playing with toy guns. His words may say no, but his overworked, overslick visual style says lock and load, baby.

The problem, of course, is that violence is so inherently cinematic, so visually and aurally captivating. Loud pops, big bangs and the sights and sounds of bodies seizing up and spurting blood have long been the stock in trade of certain movies, which partly explains why the bangs are getting ever louder, the bloodletting more spectacular. The noise in these films has grown so deafening that it can be hard to hear the message (if there even is one), especially when that message carries a familiar, been-there, done-that, eat-your-oatmeal-because-it's-good-for-you moralism. Like: guns are bad, corporations are soulless, and some first world governments traffic in third world misery. To which any reasonably informed viewer might be expected to wonder, And your point is what, exactly?

Mr. Niccol's point here, it appears, is both to entertain and to instruct with the story of Yuri, a Russian émigré who rises from humble Brooklyn to become a globe-trotting gunrunner with all the moral reasoning of a flea. Guided by Mr. Cage's intermittent voice-over, the story tracks Yuri's decades-long evolution as a merchant of death saddled with a few familiar distractions: a beautiful model wife played by Bridget Moynahan and a drug-addled brother played by Jared Leto.

Yuri gets his break in the early 1990's when he snaps up materiel in the recently imploded Ukraine that he subsequently offloads in war-ravaged Africa. Like everything else in this film, Mr. Cage's performance is watchable if never credible because his director never resolves the disconnect between this star's function (to entertain) and that of his character (to repel).… Expand

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MurbaynOct 9, 2019

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Great movie. Good story line imo and Cage just nails the role. Shows a unique perspective into arms dealing.… Expand

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Gamzguy17Aug 22, 2021

It's some serious subject matter and the film has its memorably poignant scenes/lines, but "Lord of War" greatly suffers from a cliché script with the Nicolas Cage narration holding our hands and ears through a prickly forest ofIt's some serious subject matter and the film has its memorably poignant scenes/lines, but "Lord of War" greatly suffers from a cliché script with the Nicolas Cage narration holding our hands and ears through a prickly forest of predictability. Show, don't tell.… Expand

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KenG.Sep 17, 2005

Script was lazy and slip-shot, and this was not one of Cage's better performances. Maybe because he was too busy doing voice- over narration, (which this movie relies way too much on). Lastly, I got no sense that this movie really knows Script was lazy and slip-shot, and this was not one of Cage's better performances. Maybe because he was too busy doing voice- over narration, (which this movie relies way too much on). Lastly, I got no sense that this movie really knows what it's talking about, or that film-makers made much of an effort researching this project. You won't actually learn anything about how the gun-traffic industry works.… Expand