Nicolas Cage’s Best Movie, According To Us
Nicolas Cage's best film is the dark drama Lord Of War.
Nicolas Cage is an acting legend, starring in everything from the action classics The Rock and Face/Off to the experimental strangeness of Willy’s Wonderland. Reduced to a living meme for years as he accepted nearly every role offered to him, it’s easy to forget how talented an actor he can be, and sadly, his best performance was in one of his most overlooked films, Lord Of War. The 2005 crime drama starring Cage as Yuri Orlov, an arms dealer, takes the star through every human emotion, and the result is a darkly cynical tale of how the world works.
The film’s opening scene sets the tone as it follows a bullet from the factory, to the chamber of a gun, on the way to its final destination. At the time of its filming, the United States had been involved in the Iraq war for over a year, despite worldwide protests. War weariness among the public was starting to set in, which informed Nicolas Cage’s performance as Yuri, a guy trying to profit off of conflict without regard for the death and destruction left in his wake.
Starting in the early 80s, Yuri makes it rich supplying arms to both sides of the Lebanon War, and in a bizarre echo of The Wolf Of Wall Street, uses the ill-gotten newfound fame and fortune to seduce a world-class model, Ava Fontaine (Bridget Moynahan), before realizing he’s not cut out for domestic life. Interpol Agent Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke) and his younger, drug-addicted brother, Vitaly Orlov (Jared Leto), make his life difficult just as the Soviet Union collapses and kicks off a Golden Age of arms sales.
Amazingly, the scene involving fifty tanks was filmed with the assistance of a real arms dealer that was in the process of selling them to Libya. Similarly, the 3,000 AK-47s on-screen were real SA Vz 58 rifles since securing those was cheaper than making prop guns. Because of what Nicolas Cage’s character verbalizes multiple times, the director Andrew Niccol had to get creative for funding, as the anti-government stance taken by the film wasn’t popular at the time.
Not only is Nicolas Cage portraying the dark descent of a once decent man selling his soul for a quick buck, but the final third of the film hits like a gut punch, forcing the star to portray every emotion on screen in short order, including a classic Cage freak-out moment. From regret to fear, a drug-induced joy to sad acceptance of his fate, the performance didn’t win the Renfield star any awards, but audiences took notice. With an 84 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, compared to a 61 percent fresh critic rating, fans have made Lord of War a quiet cult hit over the years.
At the time of its release, Lord of War seemed out of place as a Nicolas Cage project since it came after one of the biggest hits of his career, National Treasure, but as it turns out, the Disney film was the anomaly. Following the darkly cynical film, Cage went on to star opposite Michael Caine in the dark comedy The Weatherman and then the following year shocked audiences with The Wicker Man. Even if Hollywood tried to make him the next big star, he’s always done his best work in small-scale films that let him showcase his phenomenal range.
