Nicolas Cage, while never one of Hollywood's most attractive actors, really doesn't do himself any favors by standing next to Jared Leto.

Lord of War stars Nicolas Cage as Yuri Orlov, gunrunner, a man who will bend and break laws and disregard any notion of morality to supply the well-paying despots, tyrants and thugs he calls a client base. Yuri starts off as an immigrant kid in Brooklyn before discovering the Wonderful World of Weaponry, and ends up supplying arms to nine of the world’s top ten war zones. This guy will sell anything he can get his hands on as long as it will kill people. Not that he wants people to die, goodness no. He’d love it if everybody who shot one of his guns missed. The fact that they don’t, well, that’s not really his problem.

The plot structure of Lord of War should be familiar to anyone who’s seen Wall Street, Boogie Nights or any episode of VH-1’s Behind the Music. First act:  Success. Second act: Excess. Third act: And then, it all went horribly wrong.  Yuri is an excellent arms dealer with a knack for finding and exploiting opportunity and a quick-thinking ingenuity when it comes to evading the law, mostly personified by Ethan Hawke as a straight-arrow Interpol agent. We see the monetary rewards of Yuri’s talents as well as the horrific consequences, for which he steadfastly refuses to claim any responsibility, at least out loud. His guilt and cocaine induced delusions tell another story.

"I want to hold your hand. And a gun. Please don't make me choose."

Lord of War is an ambitious film, though not an entirely successful one and I blame writer/director Andrew Niccol’s facile script which relies entirely too much on cliché-heavy narration. I do like knowing what Yuri is thinking but wonder if maybe I couldn’t have figured some of it out myself. Yuri, who is actually an interesting character, comes off as a bit of a babbler.  And while the movie’s promos paint it as a dark comedy, it’s not really pointed or funny enough to pull that off. It’s more like a drama with some ironically funny moments.

Oh, and Andrew, try not to always go with the most obvious musical choice. "Cocaine" while people do cocaine? How ever did you think of it?

There are some fun and fascinating scenes in Lord of War, as we watch Yuri skate just out of reach of the law, smuggle and bribe a path across several continents and charm his way into the good graces of the brutal, volatile president of Liberia. The movie’s message is brought home as Yuri debates his “it’s just business” world-view with his troubled brother, Hawke’s Agent Valentine, and Ian Holm as a rival arms dealer who chides Yuri that he really should pick sides in the world’s battles.

Several of the supporting performances are quite good, most notably Jared Leto as the brother and Eamonn Walker as the Liberian president. Cage himself, though, is low-key almost to the point of laziness. Maybe he was tired from all the voice-over.

Chillingly, Lord of War is based (probably quite loosely, I’ll grant you) on a true story and gives us a glimpse into a world that we may not want to acknowledge. It isn’t a great film, but I think my soul actually died a little bit as I watched it.  That’s power, I guess.

Gorilla Pants rating: 2.5 out of 4 bananas