Mark Steyn reviews Nicholas Cage's new film, Lord of War:

For a self-consciously ‘important’ film, it’s full of careless infelicities: thus, Nicolas Cage congratulates his fellow arms dealer Ian Holm because ‘in the Iran/Iraq war you sold guns to both sides’. But he’s congratulating Holm at the 1984 Berlin Arms Show: why the past tense when the Iran/Iraq war’s in full swing?

Oh, well. Aside from that, Lord of War is a brisk trot round the last 20 years of trouble spots as seen by a chap who’s all in favour of trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with G and that stands for gun. As Cage explains in the opening scene, one in every 12 people on the planet has a gun, and, to illustrate the statistic, Niccol gives us a swift montage of one bullet’s journey from ore to assembly line to packaging, sale and eventually its final destination — straight through the skull of a stunned-looking young man. In other words, the arms industry is focused on death.

I’d say, as one of those one-in-twelve, that it’s a little more complicated than that. If those Tutsis in Rwanda had had guns, a million of them wouldn’t have been hacked to death. Niccol himself shows a Sierra Leonean mother being macheted into pulp, while an arms dealer frets about letting her killers have guns. Even if that’s the choice — being shot or hacked to death — I’d take the former. But this is Hollywood and, though every movie star has armed security, that’s no reason not to make a picture about the wickedness of the arms industry.

Incidentally, when did Hollywood decide that all of its new films must suck? I saw the ad for this movie on TV last week. It's allegedly a comedy, but if you can't make me laugh in the commercial, which, ideally, should be using your choicest material, chances are you're not going to make me laugh in the theater.

Then there's the matter of its poster. Staring at it for a few minutes, it becomes apparent that its the lead character's ring finger, but at first glance, it appears that it's the finger.

Heck, I'm old enough to remember when films used to wait until the audience paid their money to sit inside the theater before they symbolically flipped them the bird. These days, it seems like Hollywood's contempt for its American audiences doesn' t allow them to wait that long.