The movie has even bigger problems as entertainment. It supposedly sets out Yuri's story with novelistic detail—he's a Ukrainian immigrant to the U.S. from a family of four none of whom is fully able to take root in the new culture. They've settled in the Brooklyn of the 1980s, plagued by the gangsterism of their fellow immigrants, which sets Yuri to imagining how he can play the same game on a bigger scale. But the movie doesn't have the richness of incident, the cultural texture, the personal motivations of The Godfather, Part II (1974), which explains how the mafia arose in our Italian-immigrant ghettos. And Cage, way off form, and probably miscast, doesn't seem like a Ukrainian or a Brooklynite or a criminal. He's more deeply sleepy than even his Valley Boy persona would require; his body language and his voice in the start-to-finish voice-over never suggest the kind of drive that would push Yuri beyond the bounds of morality, at the cost of everything but some acorn-sized diamonds. This is a story along the lines of Brian De Palma's Scarface (1983), but Cage never musters the energy for it. He compares his first gun sale to sex, but this is not a sexy performance, not even when he's literally having sex, and he doesn't come across as driven by lust, by greed, for money or power, by much of anything. Cage plays a man who brings a world of crime and death out of himself and yet in this movie he is what I never thought he could be—a dead wire. (The movie sorely lacks the show-off gusto he wasted on The Rock (1996).)
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.
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