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88A bleak comedy, funny in a "Catch-22" sort of way, and at the same time an angry outcry against the gun traffic.
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88The film's tone is set by a bravura opening sequence that follows a single bullet from a factory conveyer belt to its resting place in a child's skull, and by Cage's flawlessly sardonic voice-over.
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80Cage is brilliant.
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80An arresting and disturbing piece of work that gets its message across without coming off as overly preachy.
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80Lord of War skims along like a dance routine. Political morality doesn't usually get such fleet choreography in the movies.
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80Brimming with cinematic confidence, cynicism, chutzpah plus dramatic bungles, Andrew Niccol's ambitious Lord of War views today's international arms trade through its anti-hero.
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80Tells Yuri's story with the same bravado and stylishness as Scorsese at his finest, with bigger-than-life characters and situations splashing across the screen in breathtaking scale.
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80A raffishly ironic and insinuating movie--and probably the most sheerly enjoyable film of the year so far.
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Picture how insufferable "GoodFellas" would be if it climaxed with a federal agent making a speech about the victims claimed by organized crime.
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75Lord of War is advocacy entertainment -- an act of mainstream provocation -- and, for the most part, it works unusually well.
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75A bravura, resonant performance by Nicolas Cage, combined with some hard questions raised about American responsibility for the worldwide glut of firearms, make the film close to a must-see, if not a must-love.
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75But the movie soars as docudrama. Niccol's model seems to have been Scorsese's "GoodFellas" and, like that film, the blitzkrieg of images and rapid-fire narration takes us on a breathtaking inside tour of a scary world. It's an extraordinary expose.
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70Lord Of War charges bravely and relentlessly into volatile territory, and it's hard to leave unscarred by the experience.
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70It's this moralizing, this slamming down of a stop sign every time the movie wants to rev its engines, that keeps Lord of War from being great. But it's three-fourths of a great movie, if nothing else, it has more brains and balls than most studio releases, for which it's to be commended and recommended.
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70A caustic satire masquerading as an action-adventure. Or maybe it's Hollywood escapism masquerading as satire.
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67Taken as a whole -- and it kills me to write this -- it just doesn't add up to much.
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63Niccol is too good a screenwriter (The Truman Show, Gattaca) not to know that Hollywood cliches are hell on a film's political bite. They muzzle it.
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Both script and performance, however, waver between black comedy and more routine international-thriller concerns.
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63Niccol doesn't always get the mix right, and the tone here is inconsistent. But the movie remains compelling, largely because of Cage's dry, deadpan delivery.
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63A black comedy, a character study, and a thriller, Lord of War lacks the gritty, hell-bent hilarity of David O. Russell's contemporary war pic, "Three Kings."
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63Intelligent but not particularly involving.
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60It would like to be "Traffic" with guns, but comes out more like "Blow" with bullets.
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60Niccol's fatal error is in making the protagonist at once amoral and insipid, an admixture thickened by Cage's loquacious yet stoned voice-over and Moynahan's moist-eyed tremblings as the trophy wife.
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50The film is always at least mildly interesting, because international arms dealing is a fairly compelling issue, but it's never as informative as a good documentary nor as engrossing as a good narrative. It's a hybrid that's frustrating in two distinct ways.
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50The film falters in the moments where it can't decide if it's an entertainment about a likable criminal, or a serious commentary on the exploitation of the Third World.
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50Of course, given the abundance of voice-over, Nic Cage is unburdened from any great need to act. But he narrates splendidly, delivering the stuff with an unrepentant glee laced with liberal doses of irony.
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50The movie is a strange amalgam of compelling visuals and fascinating vocational details forged with deep moral ambivalence and often hollow didacticism.
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50Incorporating surrealist humor and an ironic patina, Lord of War tries for irreverent satire, but the film (and especially Cage) is too muted and distant.
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50Any time you're watching a film in which the statistics in the voice-over have more intrinsic drama than the protagonists' lives, you know you're in trouble.
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50Like everything else in this film, Mr. Cage's performance is watchable if never credible because his director never resolves the disconnect between this star's function (to entertain) and that of his character (to repel).
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16The result is a dead pile of information in search of a movie.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 37 out of 55
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Mixed: 4 out of 55
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Negative: 14 out of 55
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