Lord of War? No Thanks.

I used to like Nicholas Cage. I thought he was a tough, smart and sensitive actor in many fine movies including Wild at Heart, Red Rock West, Honeymoon in Vegas and Leaving Las Vegas (one of his best). But somewhere around 1996 when he made The Rock, he discovered he could make tons of money with testosterone-filled action flicks and that’s pretty much all he’s done since. There is one major exception, and that is Adaptation in which he’s a treasure. But why can’t he do more films like that and less like Lord of War? By the way, this is one helluva hard core shoot-em-up site. Make sure you’re wearing your kevlar vest before you venture forth there.

I don’t plan on seeing the movie so I’m not going to review it. But let’s take a look at the marketing campaign. You’ll notice that Cage’s portrait is composed of bullets. The movie’s tagline is: “Where there’s a will there’s a weapon.” Well, you get the gist. This type of movie never met a gun it didn’t like, never met a violent act it didn’t embrace with gusto.

The screenwriter Andrew Niccol lavishes a great deal of time and many words building a case against guns; unfortunately, the film’s director, who also happens to be Mr. Niccol, enjoys playing with toy guns. His words may say no, but his overworked, overslick visual style says “lock and load, baby.”
–Manohla Dargis in the New York Times

Given the mess we’re making of the war in Iraq with our boys being killed every day and hundreds dead in America’s worst natural disaster, is Lord of War really the type of flick America’s longing to see just now?