“Lord of War” is a glamorized action film about guns that moves at a faster pace than the bullets fired in its shallow portrayal of a real-world crisis – or so the trailers claim. The film’s actual result is entirely more complex, deeply emotional and brutally honest than the candy coating its previews offer.

In an ultimately surprising and unexpected project, Hollywood big-timer Nicolas Cage rekindles his somewhat spotty and dispersed career with this intimate observation of one man’s life as he comes to terms with his own evils in the high-margined business of arms dealing.

Yuri Orlov, played by Cage, is a Ukrainian immigrant living in the Bronx with his only means of funds being his parents’ defunct restaurant and his brother’s mediocre borscht.

Orlov then finds the negative forces in his life to be unavoidable when he is thrown head first into the mobster syndicate of his tight-knit neighborhood.

With his hands already stained with blood, Orlov decides illegal business is much more profitable than working for his pseudo-Jewish parents.

Orlov learns quickly that gun-running isn’t only a highly lucrative business, but it is also highly dangerous. When he begins to stockpile an impressive number of enemies – both in Interpol and those who lead in the contraband business – Orlov takes a high-impact route to international success and self-destruction.

It is interesting and quite refreshing that director Andrew Niccol suppresses this highly combustible story, based on factual accounts, and focuses on the psychological price paid by these men of chilling compromise rather than burn up the screen with MTV-stylized weaponry.

Other movies have attempted to bring this multibillion dollar black market to life, however, Niccol’s gritty disposition helps portray a more real warlord – one whose immunity to the lives being taken around him is bent and eventually broken from within his own family.

Although Cage’s performance is highly accurate and methodically maintained throughout the film, his role as narrator and protagonist is almost overshadowed by Jared Leto’s part as his younger brother. He isn’t new to a narcotic-driven man’s world in cinema. He is more wild and impulsive, and his life is seemingly more tragic, yet Leto eventually turns his character into one of the few sources of humanity in this cutthroat world presented in the film.

Cage, with his cool intellect and sometimes brutal apathy, and Leto, with his struggling self-image and internal struggles, masterfully balance the utter dysfunction of the Orlov family in Niccol’s highly-defined, politically sharp commentary.

With perfectly paced emotion and sadistic viewpoint, “Lord of War” is in league with the likes of “Crash,” with its hold-no-punches mentality.

Only slightly more depressing is lack of credit given to audiences today. The comparison drawn between the message sent to potential viewers and the actual complexity of this epic can only draw the conclusion that American audiences are assumed to be nothing more than bugs, attracted to the brightest source of light and completely ignorant to the darkness around them.

This tale of one man’s journey through the gray areas of morality is an enlightenment into the mentality of century-long wars and the complacency of countries like the United States in their participation of supplying their continuance.