Lord of War could certainly use Cage at his zaniest because nothing is convincing at the literal level; apart from Cage's performance it's a very stylized depiction of its subject. (Stylized but not comic: the sole touch of wit comes when the paint on the body of an airplane Yuri is trying to pass off as his private ride smears on takeoff.) For instance, Yuri is supposedly one of the biggest arms merchants in the world, but he doesn't seem to have an organization. (He has fewer people working for him than a single-lot used-car dealer.) Yuri does it all himself--so there he is in the post-Soviet munitions warehouses snapping up AK-47s and tanks and helicopters, and there he is in the plane or on the cargo ship making deliveries and foiling the authorities. In other words, Yuri acts with superhuman effectiveness in an unrealistically vast theater, yet Cage's damp performance and Niccol's evident belief that he's showing us how these things really come about keep the brash comic-book approach from having any punch.

The comic-book romance elements include Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke), a globe-trotting superagent who is Yuri's white-knight double (and who, poor guy, has to deliver the lectures telling us what anyone could figure out for himself), and André Baptiste, Sr. (Eamonn Walker), one of Yuri's best customers (modeled on Charles Taylor, former warlord of Liberia) who is Yuri's black-knight double and who makes explicit the corruption eating Yuri from within. (Walker is the only performer who shows any authority with the material.) In addition, there are no fewer than four characters who represent the soul Yuri is sadly betraying in himself (his father, his brother, his wife, and his son), which is at least three characters too many. Yuri is written as an ironic protagonist whose justifications we're meant to see through easily; there's a wealth of comic possibility, especially since he's the self-revealing narrator, in the manner of Michael Caine as Alfie. Instead, Niccol squeezes his cartoonish irony for pathos, as if retelling Superman from the dark side but softening it to make us lament, "Poor Lex Luthor. Poor, lost Lex Luthor."

A specialist in combining slick high-tech concepts with fogeyish worrywarting (S1m0ne (2002), The Truman Show (1998), Gattaca (1997)), Niccol apparently doesn't realize that his underlying point in Lord of War is uncontroversial--gun traffickers put guns in the hands of people who do bad things with them. It's also overkill because, as Jack Valentine's pursuit of him makes plain, Yuri sells arms in contravention of law. (In other words, Niccol didn't need to make the movie to keep us from running out and selling guns to African dictators.) At the same time, Niccol shows too much for the good of this point. When Yuri sells guns to some heinous African militia that intends to massacre refugees, the sale takes place just over the hill from the refugee camp so we will know what's coming--we see militia members whack a small boy and his mother with machetes. Which establishes both that they shouldn't be sold guns but also that guns aren't the source of the problem. If one has no choice but to be massacred, wouldn't guns be preferable?