http://entertainment.iafrica.com/movies/newrelease/672644.htm

LORD OF WAR
Clichés of Africa
Nils van der Linden
Thu, 08 Dec 2005

'Lord of War' is supposed to be a satire — pity its teeth are about as sharp as a bowl of jelly.

Hampered by the stilted, pseudo-pretentious dialogue of the "If you want to change the world, you must first change yourself" variety, it takes nearly two hours to say that the United States is behind most of the world's illegal arms trade — a statement almost as revelatory as "there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq".

So, effective on that front it isn't, but as a look into a world that rivals the drug scene for money, sex, power, paranoia and, yes, drugs, this Nicolas Cage film is more than a damp firecracker. It's not a nuclear warhead either, a fiction based on fact it's a rags to riches to rags morality biopic that's more 'Blow' than the incendiary 'Scarface'.

As the wheels of Andrew Niccol's script churn almost audibly, Ukraine immigrant Yuri Orlov (Cage) slowly rises out of the lowly job at his parents' restaurant. Being a man with big (American) dreams in the 1980s, he does what any self-respecting dreamer would — enter the underworld, and soon he and his younger brother Vitaly (Jared Leto) are selling guns to countries suffering under sanctions.

"I sold guns to every army but the Salvation Army," Yuri says in one of the clunky voiceovers Niccol uses to link his disparate scenes, and despite attracting the attention of idealistic Interpol agent, Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke) the Orlov Bros. are still small fry.

But not for long — with Vitaly off in rehab, the older brother begins building up an empire that sees him profiting royally from the end of the Cold War and soon expanding his business into the African continent (home of the civil war, as he puts it).

Meanwhile on the home front he's netted the girl of his fantasies (played by Bridget Moynahan) with an elaborate ruse and is soon playing happy families — but, to use a cliché Niccol would be proud of, the dream soon turns into a nightmare.

Enter caricatured self-appointed African dictator Andre Baptiste (specialities: war mongering, megalomania, genocide) and re-enter Valentine to spoil the party as the story shifts almost exclusively to "Africa" — that dark, scary place where everyone is black, poor, uneducated, criminal and dying from Aids.

Intentionally or not, Niccol plays up the American clichés of Africa to such an extent that it grates — a feeling only partly relieved by playing spot-the-Cape Town-locations-used-to-double-as-international-sites.

Those unfamiliar with Cape Town, though, will have to make do with watching the stars rolling out their trademark performances: Cage acts smooth, laidback and smarmy; Leto looks criminally handsome; Hawke is idealism personified; and Moynahan either pouts or looks bored.

Yes 'Lord of War' is horribly flawed, but worth a look — if only for uncovering a subject we don’t normally get to see.