9 / 10
Official trailer
The Life of a Bullet
The opening credits follow a single bullet from the moment it’s made.
It rolls off a production line in a Soviet factory, gets packed in a crate, shipped across the world, loaded into a rifle and fired in a dusty African street, where it hits a boy. Nobody in that chain ever sees the boy. That’s how the business works.
Then Yuri Orlov turns to the camera, standing in a field of spent shell casings, and tells you there’s one gun for every twelve people on the planet. He wants to know how to arm the other eleven.
From that first speech, you know exactly what kind of film this is: a comedy about the most monstrous job in the world, told by a man who’s very, very good at it. I adore this film. It’s funny in a way that makes me feel a little guilty for laughing, it’s angry about something that deserves the anger, and it gives Cage a part where he gets to be quiet and lethal. My only real grumble is Ava, who deserves more than the script gives her.
For Writers
The opening follows a single bullet from factory to victim. In three minutes, with no dialogue, it shows the whole chain of responsibility the rest of the film explores.
A single object, tracked through its life, can explain a whole system faster than any exposition. Readers follow things more easily than ideas. Give them the thing, let them watch it travel, and they’ll understand the structure behind it without a lecture.
The trick works because the audience knows where the bullet ends up before the characters do. By the time Yuri starts talking, you’ve already seen the price of his product, and nothing he says can talk you out of it.
Yuri
Cage plays Yuri as a salesman, pure and simple. He’s smooth, clever, relaxed and never raises his voice. He’ll sell to anybody, as long as the cheque clears, and he’s got a neat little speech for every objection. He doesn’t sell to Osama bin Laden, he says, but only because the cheques kept bouncing.
I think this is Cage at his best, low-key and sardonic, with none of his usual shouting. Yuri’s a businessman who’s decided that morality is somebody else’s department, and Cage makes that frighteningly believable. I like him, I’m ashamed of liking him, and that discomfort is exactly what I want from this film.
His narration carries the whole film, full of dry, brutal one-liners. It’s the voice of a man who’s explained himself so many times that he’s stopped listening to the answer.
For Writers
Yuri’s narration is funny, charming and utterly amoral. The audience enjoys his company and feels uneasy about enjoying it.
Charming villains are dangerous in the best way. When a reader likes the voice telling the story, they follow it into places they’d never go with a narrator they disliked. That tension, between the pleasure of the voice and the horror of what it describes, can carry a whole book.
Keep the voice consistent. Yuri never apologizes and never explains himself too much. The moment a charming narrator starts justifying himself, the spell breaks, and the reader sees the con for what it is.
Niccol never lets Yuri beg for understanding. He just keeps talking, and the reader keeps listening. I cover this in more depth in my piece on point of view in fiction.
Vitaly
Jared Leto plays Yuri’s younger brother, Vitaly, who joins the business, can’t stomach it and falls apart. He’s the conscience Yuri buried long ago, and he pays for it with a cocaine addiction and worse. Leto is jittery and raw, and his scenes are the saddest in the film. The brothers’ final trip together, to a refugee camp in Africa where Vitaly finally cracks, is the moment the film stops being funny. Yuri watches his brother die for trying to stop a sale, and he still closes the deal. That refugee camp scene is the one that stays with me. Leto’s collapse is hard to watch, and Yuri closing the deal over his brother’s death is the coldest thing in the film. That scene is a big part of why I rate it this high.
Ethan Hawke’s Cop
Ethan Hawke plays Jack Valentine, an Interpol agent who chases Yuri around the world for twenty years, always a step behind, always sure he’ll get him next time. Hawke gives him a stubborn, weary decency, and his scenes with Cage are a lovely cat-and-mouse game between a straight arrow and a slippery one.
When Jack finally catches him, the film delivers its cruellest twist. A man from the government turns up, and Yuri walks free. He’s too useful. The big powers need freelancers like him to do the jobs they can’t be seen doing, and Jack is left standing in an interrogation room with nothing but his conscience.
For Writers
Jack spends twenty years catching Yuri, and then watches him walk free. The film denies the audience the justice it’s been promised.
When your story sets up a pursuit, the reader expects a capture. Denying it can be devastating, as long as the reason is true to the world you’ve built. Here, the reason is the film’s whole argument: the system protects Yuri because it needs him.
That’s the difference between a cheat and a gut punch. A cheat takes the payoff away for no reason. A gut punch takes it away for the reason the whole story has been building. Readers forgive the second. They never forgive the first.
Real Guns
Niccol went for real hardware wherever he could. The production reportedly used thousands of real Kalashnikovs, because they were cheaper than prop guns, and a row of real tanks, rented or bought from a dealer. The film’s most famous image, a line of battle tanks parked in a field, uses actual Soviet-era armour.
That realism gives the film a strange, queasy authenticity. There’s a wonderful sequence where Yuri’s plane full of guns is forced down on a dirt road in Africa, and by the next morning the local villagers have stripped it to the bones. It’s funny and it’s sad, and it tells you exactly where all those weapons go.
The stripped plane is my favorite sequence in the whole picture. It gets a laugh out of me and then leaves me feeling slightly sick, and that double hit is what Niccol does better here than anywhere else in his work.
The Dictator
Eamonn Walker plays André Baptiste, a Liberian dictator who becomes Yuri’s best customer, pays in diamonds and has a son who fires a gold-plated rifle into a crowd for fun. Walker makes him charming, erratic and utterly terrifying, a man who thinks Yuri’s his friend right up until the moment he stops being useful. Ian Holm has a sly supporting role as Simeon Weisz, the old-school arms dealer Yuri pushes out of the business, and the rivalry between the elegant old crook and the brash young one is a treat.
The Last Line
The final title cards remind you that the world’s largest arms suppliers are the United States, Britain, Russia, France and China, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. Yuri is a small-time crook next to them.
It’s a punch in the face, and it connects. The whole film has been making you laugh at a freelance gunrunner, and then it turns around and tells you the real merchants of death are the governments who write the rules. Niccol isn’t subtle, and he shouldn’t be.
Flaws
The film is episodic, jumping across decades and continents, and some of the middle drags. The romance with Bridget Moynahan’s Ava is underwritten, and Ava herself is a pretty blank. Some viewers will find the relentless cynicism exhausting. None of that dents it much for me. The Ava scenes are the only stretch where my attention drifts, and I’d have traded a couple of them for more of Ian Holm’s Simeon Weisz. Lord of War is a smart, funny, angry film, and Cage has rarely been better.
Craft Note
Craft Note
A man who’s made peace with his own evil narrates Lord of War, and the film lets him talk the audience into laughing along. Then it shows them the bodies, and the laughter sticks in the throat.
A story narrated by someone morally compromised can make a stronger argument than a sermon, because it lets the reader discover their own complicity.
Let the voice seduce, and let the events accuse.
The Verdict on Lord of War
It’s a 9. Lord of War is funny, slick and furious, a dark comedy about the arms trade that ends by pointing at the governments behind it, with a cool, sardonic Nicolas Cage in a part that fits him perfectly. The thin romance is what keeps it off a 10, and everything else, from the bullet’s life story to that final title card, is the film I’d want someone to make about this business. It’s as relevant now as it was in 2005.
Yuri Orlov lives entirely outside the rules of the arms trade. For the other side of it, my conversation with Cesar Dongo-Soria explains how trade-compliance mistakes can send an executive to jail.
