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?
The Constant Gardener and Lord of War don't begin to give the situations that they fictionalize their due, though The Constant Gardener is infinitely more skillful than Lord of War, which is both a mess and dull. Le Carré is a bigger cultural player than Niccol, of course, but there appears to be no difference for him between reality and a melodramatically compressed version of reality. Both le Carré and Niccol slight the issues but nonetheless pride themselves for their political "passion," which in the form it's given in these movies is even more recreational, even more useless, than Tessa Quayle's "speaking up."
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