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Lord of War

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Lord of War
File:Lord of War film.jpg
Lord of War film poster
Directed byAndrew Niccol
Written byAndrew Niccol
Produced byNicolas Cage,
Chris Roberts,
Andreas Grosch
StarringNicolas Cage
Jared Leto
Ethan Hawke
Bridget Moynahan
Distributed byLions Gate Films
Release date
16 September 2005
Running time
122 mins
LanguageEnglish
Budget~ US$42,000,000/pl
Box officeDomestic: $24,149,632
Worldwide: $70,763,303

Lord of War is a 2005 film written and directed by Andrew Niccol and starring Nicolas Cage. It was released in the United States on September 16, 2005, with the DVD following on January 17, 2006 and the Blu-ray Disc on July 27, 2006.

Cage plays the antiheroic protagonist, an illegal arms dealer with a striking similarity to Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout. Eamonn Walker's character (André Baptiste Sr.) is believed to be based on former President of Liberia Charles G. Taylor.

Plot

Where there's a will, there's a weapon.
He Sells Guns... And He's Making A Killing.
The first and most important rule of gun-running is: never get shot with your own merchandise.

Template:Spoiler

The movie begins with Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) matter-of-factly stating, "[t]here are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That's one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other eleven?" The opening credits follow the journey of a bullet, from a munitions assembly line in the Eastern bloc, through various arms dealing intermediaries, to the head of a small African boy.

The rest of the movie is told in flashback, starting in the 1980s and ending in the completion of the opening scene.

Through voiceover, Yuri Orlov describes how he first became an arms dealer. Yuri and his family came to United States from Ukraine when he was a young boy. They live in Little Odessa, a Russian community in Brighton Beach in New York City. His family pretends to be Jewish for favorable immigration conditions. His family owns a restaurant, which is useful, "because people are always going to have to eat." After Yuri sees a Russian Mafia boss kill his two would-be assassins, he decides to provide another necessity: guns.

Before beginning his career in earnest, he approaches Simeon Weisz (Ian Holm), a seasoned arms dealer, at an arms convention with a business proposal. Weisz turns him down, dismissing him as an amateur. He partners up with his brother, Vitaly (Jared Leto), and begins selling arms. Yuri keeps his multiple identities and paperwork in a security container. He starts small and begins selling M-16 rifles that the US Army left behind from the 1982 Lebanon War.

As he grows, Yuri (through voiceover) tells of his first incident with Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke), a dogged Interpol agent who cannot be bought with money. The first encounter in the movie is when Yuri is on the ship Kristol smuggling a shipment of weapons, including M-16s. He gets a call stating that the authorities have been tipped off; Yuri changes the ship name to the Kono and uses a French flag turned sideways to seem like a Dutch flag, and the first encounter with Jack Valentine smoothly plays out in Yuri's favor.

During his latest business deal with a Bolivian drug lord, Yuri is paid in cocaine instead of cash. Yuri objects and is shot in the heated exchange. He hastily agrees to the deal and leaves in a taxi with the load of cocaine. Vitaly is unsure of what to do next and asks Yuri what to do. Yuri answers by saying "let's celebrate." They both end up snorting cocaine, but Vitaly becomes addicted, and Yuri takes him to a rehabilitation center. From then on, Yuri conducts the arms business alone. Shortly after this episode, he begins to court Ava Fontaine, a successful model who came from the same neighborhood. After booking a fake photo shoot for $20,000 and the entire hotel for $12,000, they marry, move into an apartment on Park Avenue, Manhattan and later have a son. Ava becomes a painter, however her works do not sell well. Without her knowing, Yuri becomes her best customer.

His business is still relatively small, but finally Yuri gets his big break when the Soviet Union dissolves. Gorbachev's Christmas Day 1991 resignation speech is shown on television when his son walks for the first time; Yuri shows more interest in the TV than in his family. He contacts his uncle, Dimitri, a general of the former Red Army, now left in bureaucratic limbo, as the new Ukrainian government and military are in the infancy of their organization. Taking him onside with his business, Yuri buys Dimitri's tanks and AK-47s to expand his inventory. Meanwhile, Interpol agent Jack Valentine stalks Yuri, nearly catching him when Yuri is loading weaponry, along with an old model Mi-24 Hind onto a Russian ship bound for Burkina Faso. Fortunately, Yuri exploits a loophole in the law banning the export of a military helicopter: if unarmed and converted to civilian use, their export is not prohibited; the weapons are subsequently removed with speed and packaged for separate shipping. Valentine growls about the loopholes and vows that they will be closed, but has no choice but to release Yuri.

Shortly after this, Dimitri is assassinated by a car bomb, compliments of Weisz. Yuri moves on to selling arms to the West African dictator of Liberia, André Baptiste (believed to be based on Charles Taylor). Jack Valentine continues his pursuit of Yuri, confident that he will eventually slip up. He doggedly searches the garbage of the Orlov household. After painstakingly reconstructing a dumpster full of Yuri's shredded documents, Valentine discovers that Yuri will soon be making a cargo run to Sierra Leone.

Yuri's cargo plane, an Antonov An-12, is intercepted by an L-39 jet trainer. Yuri instructs the pilot to land the plane on a dirt road, knowing the fighter will not be able to land there. After landing safely, and having been deserted by the plane's crew, he gives the entire shipment of arms away to passers-by. When Jack Valentine finally arrives, the plane is empty, and there is no evidence of the arms shipment. Jack deliberately keeps Yuri detained for twenty-four hours (the longest detention allowed without charge), before he is forced to release him, because, as he argues, any delay in the arms trade saves lives. Yuri is left unguarded in the wild for 24 hours with handcuffs on, and spent his time watching the plane being stripped to the frame by locals (The scene was shot in Time-lapse). The theme music during this time-lapse scene really captures the emotion of the moment. It's from A.R. Rahman, music director from India.

By now, Yuri has established a very good relationship with André Baptiste, but is horrified when Baptiste captures Weisz as a "present." Baptiste invites Yuri to kill Weisz. When Yuri refuses, Baptiste puts the gun in his hand while slowly pulling the trigger himself. Yuri is invited to say "stop" at any time, but only says it after the shot. Soon after this incident, a local insistently offers Yuri "brown-brown", a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder, and becomes extremely intoxicated by the mixture. After a point in his delirium, he finds out that he has had sex with an African prostitute, with the uncomfortably high probability that she is HIV-positive. Still in a daze, he wanders around and sees an amputated kid asking him for a limb. He also encounters a pack of hyenas, but the scavengers don't bother with him.

Jack keeps Yuri under surveillance, and one day he reveals to Ava that Yuri is an arms dealer. At first, she does not believe him, but eventually realizes the truth. Ava confronts him about his business; he promises that he will stop. He makes more legal deals to exploit the resources of poor nations, but complains that the margins are low and competition is high. A year later, Baptiste and his son come over and visit Yuri (on their way to United Nations headquarters for a peace talk) with another arms deal offer. Yuri initially refuses, but when Baptiste indicates that he will be much more generous than usual, Yuri relents.

He takes Vitaly along to the deal, which turns out to be in Sierra Leone. However, during the deal, Vitaly becomes distressed: he sees men kill a mother and child in a nearby village of unarmed civilians and tells Yuri that their customers will kill all the villagers right after Yuri sells the weapons. He pleads with Yuri to cancel the shipment. Yuri, who goes by the slogan, "They're not our fight," tries to convince him that someone else will sell the weapons if they do not; he also argues that both of them will be killed if they try to cancel the deal. Vitaly pretends to agree but seems troubled (Yuri's voice over: "At this moment I didn't understood what was on his mind. I think I never understood what was on his mind"). In a bold act, Vitaly takes two grenades and destroys half of Yuri's shipments and kills Baptiste's son, before the guards then kill him. Yuri takes half of the payment for the remaining half of his shipment. Of the incident, Yuri says that it was true that the village dwellers were massacred after he handed the weapons over, but, "There were half a dozen other massacres that week. They say that 'evil prevails when good men fail to act.' It ought to be 'evil prevails.'"

Yuri ships his brother's remains back to the United States. He pays someone to remove the bullets from Vitaly's body, but one bullet remains, and Yuri is stopped by customs. Meanwhile, while being followed by Jack Valentine, Ava finds Yuri's security container, finally establishing the definitive proof of Yuri's guilt. Ava also finds the container full of her paintings, which Yuri secretly bought. Ava takes their son and leaves him. When Yuri calls his parents, his mother says, "Both my sons are dead." Valentine detains Yuri and tells him that he has a long jail sentence ahead of him, but Yuri abruptly brings him back to reality. In a forward statement, he proclaims that the United States government is a much bigger supplier of arms ("they sell in a day more than me in one year") than him, that some of Orlov's customers are useful to US foreign policy (i.e. "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"), and that to put him on trial would bring too many embarrassing revelations. He tells Valentine that there will be a knock at the door, and that a high ranking military officer will be standing outside, and that he will order Yuri's release. Valentine hears a knock at the door and realizes this reality and states, "I would tell you to go to hell, but I think you're already there." Valentine answers the pending knock and Yuri is released just as he predicted.

A free man again, and without his family and friends, he returns to selling arms. In the closing scene of the film, he is in North Africa and gives two guards a packaging slip for a shipment of umbrellas. "Umbrellas? In the Sahara?" one guard asks incredulously. "Sun umbrellas," Yuri says. The guards lift up the slip—revealing a plush bribe—and both guards immediately wave them through. The movie ends by proclaiming that, even if the weapon dealers do well, the U.S., the UK, France, Russia and China (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council) are the world's leading arms dealers, closing with the statement that "This film is based on actual events" as the camera rolls over thousands of empty shell casings covered in mud and blood until they fade away and the credits ensue.

Template:Endspoiler

Yuri's Rules

Orlov has four rules in gunrunning.

  1. "Most Important Rule" Never get shot with your own merchandise.
  2. Always have a fool-proof way to get paid.
  3. "the Cardinal rule of Gunrunning" Never pick up a gun and join your customer.
  4. Never go to war. Especially with yourself.

Trivia

  • There is a real Yuri Orlov who is a human rights activist.
  • The high-ranking United States military officer who protects Yuri is called "Colonel Oliver Southern", a pun on the name of real-life Col. Oliver North, who was involved in a scheme to fund Nicaraguan Contras via illegal arms sales to Iran (See also: Iran-Contra Affair).
  • The UK DVD release of Lord of War includes, prior to the film, an advert for Amnesty International, showing the AK-47 being sold on a shopping channel of the style popular on cable networks.
  • The name Kono, which Yuri paints as the Kristol's new registry, is also the name of a diamond rich province in Sierra Leone.
  • Rather than use mock weapons or computer animated tanks, the film-makers found it cheaper to buy real weapons and rent the tanks. According to the DVD commentary, these tanks were then sold to Libya by their owner, only a month later.
  • The song playing during the film's opening credits is "For what it's worth" performed by 1960's band Buffalo Springfield.
  • When Yuri is handcuffed and left alone with the plane in Africa, the music playing is the theme music from the Indian film Bombay. The music is composed by A. R. Rahman.

Goofs

  • Yuri's son Nicolai was born in 1991 but as the movie progresses to the year 2001 he seems to be around 4 years old.
  • When Yuri's wife is looking through his storage container, Nicolai is seen standing by the door. The shot cuts to Ava, and when it cuts back, Nicolai is not there. The shot cuts again, and this time Nicolai is seen standing at the door again.
  • It shows Yuri watching the end of the Cold War on a flat screen T.V. Such televisions had not been invented yet.
  • There is no such thing as an Interpol agent with worldwide jurisdiction. (This is a common error in many films.)
  • Yuri’s limousine prior to going to Colombia in 1989 was a 5th generation Cadillac Fleetwood model only produced from 1993-1996. Additionally, you can briefly see a 1st generation Ford Expedition driving pass on the elevated highway above the limousine as Yuri opens his shipping container; Expeditions were not introduced until 1997.
  • The closing caption states that the United States, United Kingdom, Russia, China and France (also the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council) are the world's top five arms exporters. This statement has been disputed. While the United States is indeed the largest weapons exporter in the world by far, the validity of this claim as applied to some of the other nations, has been actively debated. (see Top Arms Exporters)
  • The K on the repainting of the ship is actually upside down.

Weaponry in Lord of War

Firearms

Vehicles

Cast

References


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