So this is a film that I enjoyed a lot when I was younger, though this was clearly before I acquired anything resembling taste in films because I thought Nicolas Cage was an amazing actor based on his performance in Gone In 60 Seconds. Yuck.

Lord of War presents itself as a stylish action/thriller/drama based on the real-life events of a gunrunner. He starts off small and then becomes hugely successful in the space of a cut; becomes the best, loses everything, but then it turns out he didn't lose anything. Nothing important anyway. Just his wife, son, parents and Jared Leto. Seriously, at the end of the film he just goes and gets on with selling his shooters, seemingly completely unaffected.

The film is an enjoyable watch (for the first 2 thirds at least) purely because it's about a smart-arse being a smart-arse and getting away with it, and you can be willing to forgive the plot holes because of this, but the one thing that really annoys me with this film is the way the characters speak. When it comes to dialogue, this film is so far up its own arse that it has a metaphor for the smell. Every line has to have some sort of add-on to make it sound smooth and clever and deep. I'm willing to forgive films for doing this occasionally, but it's pretty much every line in Lord of War.

"What's the 'Beware of the Dog' sign about? We don't have a dog." 
"It's to remind me to beware of the dog inside me."

Really? Well I hope it humps your heart on the offbeat and you die of cardiac arrest. People don't talk like that!! Even Nicolas Cage's narration is full of these pretensions.

"To this day I don't know what Vit was running from. Then again, maybe he didn't know."

Urgh. My tip to anyone watching Lord of War is cover your ears whenever you hear a connective, because what follows will add to nothing except the writer's ego.

So, yeah. Lord of War isn't the worst film in the world. It just has the most annoying dialogue in the world. And Jared Leto.