Lord of War: Critic Reviews

The result is a dead pile of information in search of a movie.

Nicolas Cage stars as a globe-trotting gunrunner in this misfire of a political satire about the international gun market.

Intelligent but not particularly involving.

Lord of War has a hip, gonzo energy to it and it's often transfixing to watch and listen to. But it's finally just as empty as the man it's about.

Lord of War is advocacy entertainment -- an act of mainstream provocation -- and, for the most part, it works unusually well.

As slick, flashy public-service announcements go, Lord of War is no Constant Gardener.

Movies usually show bullets as if they're generic, anonymous masses of metal coming off a conveyor belt, while Lord of War wants us to see that each bullet is inscribed with somebody's name.

Its best moments burn with irony.

It gives moviegoers something to think about. If that recommendation sounds too dutiful, let it be known that it's exciting as well as thought-provoking.

There should be a phrase for the errors Lord of War makes: Call them substance abuse.

A raffishly ironic and insinuating movie -- and probably the most sheerly enjoyable film of the year so far.

A bleak comedy, funny in a Catch-22 sort of way, and at the same time an angry outcry against the gun traffic that turns 12-year-olds into killers and cheapens human life to the point where might makes not only right, but everything else.

The film is morally unsettling on its surface, and then you realize the surface is all you're going to get.

A caustic satire masquerading as an action adventure.

Lord of War would have worked better if its message had been more muted, muffled. Niccol could have used a silencer on his gun.

The viewer needs to bond with Yuri or we won't care what happens; but a lot of what happens is distasteful.

As a drama, it isn't much. As education, its heart is certainly in the right place. As an entertainment experience, it's more than a bit of a repetitive.

[Cage] makes everything bearable, applying his usual talent for giving unsavory characters some attractive traits.

Niccol's script is finally too much for the film to hold onto.

It's worth overlooking Lord of War's flaws.

His heavy-handedness and inability to humanize and explain his hero mean that even the choir Niccol is preaching to won't be moved by Lord of War.

Lord of War tosses grenades and then fearfully runs from them.

It's just a well-intended essay, a movie when necessary but not necessarily a movie.

ELord Of War drops the hammer slowly, laying out the fascinating parameters of Cage's world before opening up its argument in an astonishing denouement.

An oddly satisfying mesh of an international action-adventure with an extremely dark satire about the global arms trade.