Nicholas Cage sells his soul

Word of War, a misfire of a political satire about the

international gun market, opens with a killer scene: Nicolas Cage standing on a veritable carpet of bullet casings. Cage's character, Yuri Orlov, is a gunrunner who has placed untold weapons in untold numbers of hands. Now, surrounded by gutted buildings and dressed to impress, a cigarette burning between his fingers, Yuri looks straight into the camera and wonders aloud how he can furnish everyone in the world with a gun to call his very own.

This carpet of casings also serves as a launching pad for a subsequent and even more outlandish opening credit sequence that tracks a bullet from its manufacture in Russia to its final resting place in the skull of a young African. A bullet in the head always seizes the imagination or at least the audience's attention, but because the African is merely

cinematic collateral damage, the image registers both as

showboating and as a warning shot for the problems to come. The screenwriter for Lord of War, Andrew Niccol, lavishes a great deal of time and many words building a case against guns;

unfortunately, the film's director, who also happens to be Niccol, enjoys playing with toy guns. His words may say no, but his overworked, overslick visual style says lock and load, baby.

The problem, of course, is that violence is so inherently cinematic, so visually and aurally captivating. Loud pops, big bangs and the sights and sounds of bodies seizing up and spurting blood have long been the stock in trade of certain movies, which partly explains why the bangs are getting ever louder, the bloodletting more spectacular. The noise in these films has grown so deafening that it can be hard to hear the message (if there even is one), especially when that

message carries a familiar, been-there, done-that, eat-your-oatmeal-because-it's-good-for-you moralism. Like: guns are bad,

corporations are soulless, and some first world governments traffic in third world misery. To which any reasonably informed viewer might be expected to wonder, And your point is what, exactly?

Niccol's point here, it appears, is both to entertain and to instruct with the story of Yuri, a Russian emigre who rises from humble Brooklyn to become a

globe-trotting gunrunner with all the moral reasoning of a flea. Guided by Cage's intermittent voice-over, the story tracks Yuri's decades-long evolution as a merchant of death saddled with a few familiar distractions: a

beautiful model wife and a

drug-addled brother.

Yuri gets his break in the early 1990s when he snaps up materiel in the recently

imploded Ukraine that he

subsequently offloads in

war-ravaged Africa. Like

everything else in this film, Cage's performance is watchable if never credible because his director

never resolves the disconnect

between this star's function (to entertain) and that of his character (to repel).