Viktor Bout, Arms Traders, And Lord of War (2005)

Andrew Niccol's 2005 fictitious exploration of the illegal and semi-legal international small arms trade, Lord of War, casts Nicolas Cage as Yuri Orlov, a Ukrainian-American arms dealer who enters the arms trade small-time but quickly becomes the leading dealer in the world, backing African dictators with illegally acquired surplus arms from the political wreckage of post-Soviet Ukraine and Russia: assault rifles, tanks, helicopter gunships, and pretty much everything in between.

It's pretty hard to identify what Lord of War really is. Wikipedia calls it a "political crime thriller." You could call it political thriller combined with black comedy, I suppose. But what's blacker than the script itself is the method that joint producers Niccol and Cage took to manufacturing this "fiction."

Yuri Orlov: Arms Dealer Extraordinaire

Cage plays Orlov, a Ukrainian-American who sees the black market in guns as a lucrative alternative to a career in his father's small restaurant. He soon realizes that the global small-arms trade is far more exciting and profitable than hawking guns to gangs in New York, and starts cultivating cordial relationships with Latin American drug lords, African dictators, and Third World rebels of all kinds, establishing his reputation as an expert in United Nations sanction-busting. He also develops a striking talent for black humour; after Liberian dictator Andre Baptiste (a thin cover-name for real Liberian dictator Charles Taylor) shoots an overly flirtatious soldier with one of the weapons Orlov is presenting for sale, Orlov attempts to cover his instinctive moral reaction (objecting to the pointless murder) with a sarcastic comment that Baptiste will not be allowed a refund for this "used gun."

Niccol does a disturbingly good job of convincing we the viewers to empathize with Orlov, to the point that on one occasion (but only one) I strangely found myself relieved for him as he escapes his movie-long nemesis, INTERPOL detective Jack Valentine (played by Ethan Hawke). Why INTERPOL has resources for such activities the movie does not explain (certainly there is no exact counterpart to Valentine in real life), but it is an important part of the movie.

In one particularly chilling moment (with obvious parallels to real-life politics), Valentine actually does succeed in bringing in Orlov with introconvertible evidence of his illegal arms deals. Orlov calmly informs the triumphant special agent that high-level political orders will soon be on the way to prepare his release: Orlov is simply too useful to his occasional clients the American government (and the governments of the other leading world nations, Russia, China, Britain and France) for them to let him actually be prosecuted and taken out of the game. To Valentine's frustration, the orders arrive as predicted and Orlov is soon back in business.

Not that it hasn't taken its toll on him. During his gradual shedding of any semblance of real morals (at the end, he continues to cling to the paper-thin excuse that he's just selling the guns, it's other people who are actually using them), he loses most of what he originally considered important. He loses the trust and respect of his wife and family. He loses his own brother -- in a climactic moment, Vitaly attempts to interrupt an arms sale to a rebel group poised to massacre a refugee camp, and is shot dead by one of Orlov's clients. A visibly shaken Yuri Orlov still completes the transaction.

An Insightful Portrayal of the Global Arms Trade

One of the frequent criticisms in this movie is that the black comedy tends to be so excessive that it hides the amount of blood shed by the guns people like Orlov, in the real world, are actually selling. I'm not sure I agree. It's certainly a valid criticism. On the other hand, in doing just that, Niccol and Orlov's movie succeeds in exposing something else: the appallingly bloodless, cynically "clean" nature of what probably goes on at the elite levels of international politics, including the arms trade.

At the same time, the blanket of cynicism clearly is disturbing to the point of disarming. The overwhelmingly obvious response to Lord of War isn't that the arms trade should be stopped: it's that the arms trade can't be stopped. There's nothing that can be done, Orlov points out. Even if a police officer like Valentine succeeds in shutting him down, dictators like Baptiste/Taylor will just find someone else to market their weapons for them.

The only solution, Orlov does say once, is to make sure that you never fight a war. Another solution, I suppose, would be to change the way the big governments regularly do business in the world. On one occasion, an insightful Valentine points out that the AK-47 guns Orlov is flooding Africa with are the real "weapons of mass destruction": they kill half a million people a year, while the big nuclear missiles of Russia and America merely "sit in their siloes" and ultimately kill no one. Orlov responds that people like him are really just small-timers, meandering around Africa in their surplus Russian cargo planes while the U.S., Russia, and the other permanent members of the Security Council sell more guns per day than Orlov does per year.

And maybe the arms trade goes on, but the individuals in it do sometimes face retribution. Baptiste's real-life model, Charles Taylor, is now on trial in the Hague for his crimes, having been arrested the year after Lord of Warwas released. His son, who lovingly nicknamed Orlov's AK-47s "Rambo's Gun" and murdered his father's subjects for sport, is also on trial.

Baptiste isn't the only one who is based on a real-life figure. Orlov himself is apparently modelled after several real-life arms dealers, including Leonid Menin and Viktor Bout. His long-time rival Simon Weisz, executed by himself and Baptiste, is probably long-time CIA operative Samuel Cummings. (In real life, Cummings actually died of a stroke, rather than being a murder victim.)

As for Orlov's models, Bout is a former Soviet intelligence agent who went into the private sector after his country fell apart. It's Bout who had the close working relationship with Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, and for a brief time last year it looked like he would actually be extradited from Thailand to the United States and actually charged for some of his crimes. Hopes for that were scotched when he defeated the extradition case in Bangkok. Bout also has an informal "airline" of sorts which runs shipments into Africa (more on this point later; it's surprisingly significant).

Neither Menin nor Bout are Ukrainian-Americans who got their start in the New York underground. That particular part of Orlov's back story is probably drawn from Leonid Fainberg, whose exploits during the 1990s eventually got too much for the American authorities when he brazenly contracted with Colombian drug merchants to supply a Soviet naval submarine. Fainberg got off lightly (like Orlov himself) and briefly lived in Canada before being deported.

But, What Did They Sacrifice to Gain These Insights?

What, in terms of the health of their souls, I suppose, if you'll forgive me for getting so sentimentally theological.

You see, the most obvious way of getting an insightful picture of the mentality of an arms trader is to go and interview one. And the most obvious way of getting props for an arms trade movie is to rent real small arms from those traders. To produce Lord of War, Cage and Niccol did both, at least according to their somewhat oblique references to production in the special features section of my DVD.

Take the guns, for instance. Niccol claims, probably correctly, that once they'd made their contacts in the arms trade underground, buying fake guns actually cost more than acquiring real ones - and so they did the latter. Three thousand AK-47 assault rifles were rented to produce the warehouse scene in the Ukraine. That line of Russian battle tanks is real, too, but it was filmed in a trade yard, shortly before they were shipped to Libya. Orlov's cargo aircraft is real, too, and given that it's a Russian surplus Antonov, it was almost certainly rented from none other than Viktor Bout himself.

The voice-over on the DVD indicates great interest and fascination with the process by which these "artifacts" of the real-life arms trade were acquired for Hollywood purposes. Niccol and Cage do not seem to realize that what they have actually done is enter on positive terms the world that they are supposedly criticizing in the movie. Indeed, by renting the weapons, they are actually financing arms dealers.

It seems fit to close by returning not to Orlov but to his American competitor, Weisz. You see, Weisz's real-life counterpart, Samuel Cummings, got his start in the 1950s as a lowly CIA plant, using the cover story that he was a Hollywood purchasing agent trying to buy movie props.

List of Sources

Wikipedia. "Samuel Cummings."

__________. "Viktor Bout."