Lord of War DVD: Review By Brian Gallagher

Andrew Niccol is one of my favorite filmmakers. He's just as ballsy as Tarantino, but doesn't have the name or the mouth to back it up; he lets his work do the talking. He has written and directed Gattaca and S1m0ne, and wrote The Truman Show (he was supposed to direct, but the studio balked, getting Peter Weir instead) and had a story credit on The Terminal, which was so dissappointing to me that I wish I had Niccol's draft to see how much better it would've been. All of these flicks are daring and original, usually with pretenses towards the future, technology and how the human element reacts to both. Niccol switched it up a bit this time with his latest flick Lord of War, a gunrunning flick based on actual events, and while we see a new Niccol in some aspects, the old, brilliant Niccol still remains the same.

The movie starts out with one of the best opening credit sequences I've ever seen. We see, from the factory to the firing, the entire process a single bullet goes through. It was in real time, apparently with a small camera attatched to the bullet, and it's just a fascinating piece of cinema. The focus of this flick is Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage), which is a composite character based on 5 real-life gunrunners. Orlov was an immigrant from Odessa Ukraine and grew up in a section of New York known as "Little Odessa". His parents had a small restaurant that both he and his younger brother Vitaly (Jared Leto) worked in. But Yuri knew he wanted something bigger from life, and it took a routine hit on a Russian mobster in his neighborhood to find his calling: guns. So he set off to make his living selling guns with his brother, slowly getting the hang of things and rising in status as an arms dealer. Of course, it wasn't too long before Johnny Law caught up with him in the form of g-man Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke). His slope gets even more slippery when he finally nabs his dream girl, Eva Fontane (the luscious Bridget Moynahan) and starts a family along with competing with a main rival (Ian Holm), putting his brother in rehab for cocaine over and over again, constantly avoiding Valentine, all while dealing with and arming some of the most sadistic leaders in the world, primarily Andre Baptiste (Eamonn Walker).

Nicolas Cage delivers a standout performace here as Orlov, adding to his string of fine work since his Oscar-nominated performance in Adaptation. We don't see a lot of Cage's edgy/panicy side, a side he showed way too much in his action flicks of the 90s and early 21st Century, and he delivers a suave performance, with touches of great range, though it's not overly called for with his character. Jared Leto gives a whacked-out portrayal of Vitaly, showing much more range; calm but malcontent as a cook in his parents restaurant, edgy and nervous as an arms dealer and just plain out of his skull when he's on the powder. There's an especially amusing scene, right when he gets hooked on the coke, where Yuri tracks him down and finds him in a daze, creating an intricate outline of the Ukraine in cocaine. Ethan Hawke does a decent job as Jack Valentine, and Eamonn Walker is pretty good as Baptiste, but Bridget Moynahan, however gorgeous she may be, wasn't too impressive as Eva, although there didn't seem to be much cause for that in the script.

Niccol does a fine job with the script, going back to the voice-over style he used with Gattaca. The dialogue is fairly crisp and funny, and there is a lot more action than we've seen in all of his works combined, though he handled rather well. When you get through all the violence and politics, those are all just layered on top of this simple story of a man simply trying to make his ends, in a most complicated fashion, and how he deals with and reacts to it all. It's paced very well, although I didn't think he handled the family turmoil aspect of the flick too well, but that's a very small element of the movie. You could almost look at it like the movie Blow, but substituting arms dealing for drug dealing. Niccol's direction is solid as well, especially in that opening credit sequence, using a variety of intriguing camera techniques and using his talent, mostly, to the best of their abilities.

The first special feature on here is The Making of The Lord of War, a 20-minute featurette with insights on the movie from members of the cast and crew. This is pretty standard stuff, as far as Special Features go, and they don't really do a whole lot different. It was interesting how writer-director Andrew Niccol got most of his weapons and even the big row of tanks from actual arms dealers. Niccol said that he could only use the tanks for a brief period of time, because he was selling them to another country. All the AK-47's in the movie were actual guns as well, because it was cheaper to buy those real guns than fake guns. Other than that, the rest was a lot of glad-handing, but I thought it was interesting that while we heard a lot of Andrew Niccol in here, we never see him in a sit-down interview fashion, although he pops up here and there in behind the scenes footage. Some of this was fairly informative, but the rest we've all seen before.

The next feature is Making a Killing: Inside the International Arms Race, a 15 minute feature that shows us real people involved in arms and the preventing of illegal arms trade. This feature is OK, but all they really do is throw a lot of facts out at us from government officials, authors and even a sole rep from a weapons manufacturer. It doesn't give us a whole lot of insight that we didn't already get in the movie, and, really, it was kind of boring.

Next up is Weapons of the Trade, an interactive menu that features 8 highly used weapons: the AK-47, Famas, Glock 19, M16, M240, HK MP5, RPG-7 and the UZI. This is a pretty informative feature. For each gun you get a brief history of the weapon's inception and detailed specs on them. It's a pretty cool feature, especially for the historical aspects of how these weapons all came to be.

Next up is a Photo Gallery which I wasn't quite sure why it was here. These are all fine and good for a movie's official website, if the movie hasn't come out yet, but I just got done watching the movie, and I really don't need a bunch of stills from it. There are 66 photos in all, and the last few are a few from behind the scenes, but most of them I really didn't need to see because, well, I've already seen them.

There is also the Theatrical Trailer and, the Special Features mainstay, Deleted Scenes. I never like these, because there is always a REASON a particular scene was deleted. Of the 7 deleted scenes, all of which were under a minute and a half, there were only 2, the last two, that they probably could've used in the movie, but still weren't vastly important. The rest were well worthy of the cutting-room floor.

This isn't a cheery, rosy-cheeked flick, so they use a lot of darker colors, greys and blacks, here very well, and it all looks very sleek in the 1.78:1 (16x9) widescreen format.

Sound is definitely a key here, as there are numerous explosions and countless rounds of gunfire that can be heard. The sound is very crisp in either the 6.1 DTS-ES Digital Audio or 5.1 Dolby Digital Surround EX, for those with a surround sound system.

This special edition is packaged extrememly well. They don't use one of those sleeves that look exactly the same as the keep-case when you slide it off, but they go a different route here. There is a nice front cover, with Cage in the background of some tanks and explosions and a few critics quotes below it, but on the sides, its made to look like this package was riveted together, and that's a nice touch. The back cover is even better, with another critic quote, a few stills, a nice synopsis, special features box, and a great picture of Cage sitting on the fallen statue of Lenin, with a row of tanks in front of him. The special features box does have some of the technical details, which really aren't special features, but that's not a big deal. But this front and back cover is a big cover itself, because that slides off with basically another package inside with the discs. The front cover of this pullout has more critics quotes on the top and bottom, with a greyscale background of a militant, and a rip in the foreground that has some more color photos. Inside is a big greyscale picture of one of the weapons silos and a plastic casing with a disc on each side. On the back is a full-color shot with Cage in the foreground, and Hawke and more tanks and explosions in the background and yet another critics quote below it. This is just some awesome packaging folks.

You can throw a pebble in a video store and you'd probably hit a movie that features a bad guy with a gun. And most bad guys with guns don't hit up the local Wal-Mart to pick up their gats. This flick gives us a unique glimpse into the illegal arms trade, told through an elite arms dealer, who has to deal with a whole lot more than just arms. It's a wonderful movie about the passion, drive and innovation needed to succeed in ones calling, even if that calling is insanely illegal. The special features don't offer as much real-life insight into this trade as I'd hoped, but there is still plenty of goodies in this 2-disc set that's well worth the extra money for the extra disc.