Lord of War (2005)
Lion's Gate DVD (region 4)
d. Andrew Niccol; pr. Andrew Niccol, Chris Roberts, Teri-Lin Robertson, Philippe Rousselet, Nicolas Cage; scr. Andrew Niccol; ph. Amir Mokri; m. Antonio Pinto; ed. Zach Staenberg; cast. Nicolas Cage, Ethan Hawke, Bridget Moynahan, Jared Leto, Ian Holm, Jean-Pierre Nshanian, Eamonn Walker, Sammi Rotibi (122 mins)
“There’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.” These lyrics tap into American ethical conduct in the years following 9-11 and introduce the arms-dealing world of Lord of War, which charts the rise of an arms merchant from his beginnings in New York in the 1980s through various historical entanglements, including Lebanon after the first suicide bombing, which whilst not directly addressing terrorism nevertheless reference it. Indeed, the arms dealer, like the mercenary, has always been an ambiguous figure in the terrorist genre, a amoral merchant of no ideological scruples willing to enable terrorism for a profit. Ironically, the arms dealer played by Nicolas Cage is here the epitome of entrepreneurial American capitalist enterprise: a European immigrant selling weapons to achieve the American Dream.
When the Americans evacuated Lebanon following the first Embassy suicide bombing wave, they left their munitions (it being cheaper and more practical to buy new ones that to take them back), the stockpile of which Cage sells for a profit, a kickback going to a US military officer. At the same time, he picks up loose dollars behind a wall while on the other side of it children are executed by firing squad. This cynical, amoral black humour distinguishes Lord of War, whose core character sells Israeli-made Uzis to Muslims to wage war on Israel. Cage admits shipping cargo to Afghanistan to help fight the Soviets, although admits that he never sold to Osama bin Laden not on moral grounds but because back then Osama “was always bouncing checks.” In its sense of mounting absurdity, Lord of War is the War on Terror equivalent of Catch 22 with an equally cynical sense of the morality of warfare and profit-making: in one scene in Lord of War, the sound of the bullet cartridges being expelled from an automatic weapon is that of a cash register.
The fall of the Soviet Union provides just the opportunity Cage needs: disgruntled former Soviet troops and warehouses full of weapons from Soviet troop withdrawals in the Ukraine: just the theme that action films of the 1990s latched onto – the threat of former Soviet weapons falling into dangerous hands. The humour here also recalls the cynical critiques of American entrepreneurialism in the military in Kelly’s Heroes and Three Kings, where ideology and national pride are secondary to the pursuit of riches. The agent trailing Cage, played by Ethan Hawke, comments that the paranoia of nuclear war is such that nuclear weapons are in no danger compared to the fact that 9 out of 10 people killed in wars die by small arms and automatic rifle fire – most of the weapons Cage sells. The rivalry between Cage and Hawke here would find an ironic echo in the later film American Gangster, about the drugs trade. However, the adversity between Cage and competing arms dealer Ian Holm adds a layer of irony in the analysis of the ego these admittedly powerful men in the arms trade have.
Amorality and humanity are curiously mixed in Lord of War but its focus is on African civil war in Liberia and Sierra Leone to the extent that the earlier allusions to bin Laden and terrorism remain background context until the end, with the suggestion that the War on Terror has obfuscated existing ethics to the point where Cage will not face prosecution for violating arms embargoes because he supplies to those who share the terrorist enemy the US faces in the War on Terror. Hence the chilling conclusion to this film: men like Cage are a “necessary evil” in the US War on Terror and that the biggest arms dealers in the world are the USA, UK, Russia, France and China – the five permanent members of the UN security council.
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