Ukrainian immigrant Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage, who also narrates the film without a trace of accent) begins the tale of his dramatic rise and supposed fall by telling us “There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That’s one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other eleven?”

Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” (”There’s somethin happenin here …”) is cued up and in the first of several bravura sequences, we follow a bullet from its birth on an assembly line, shipment overseas past Russian customs and to a war zone in Africa, where it is loaded into an AK-47 and fired through a boy’s head.

Growing up in New York’s Little Odessa, Yuri applies the logic of his father, whose rationale in opening a restaurant is that people will always be hungry. Instead, Yuri goes into business smuggling arms – sometimes legal, sometimes not, sometimes a bit of both – with his brother Vitaly (Jared Leto), who expresses reservations about the moral implications of what they’re doing and eventually slips in and out of drug rehab.

Starting out by selling used M-16s the U.S. left behind when they evacuated Lebanon in 1982, Yuri’s big break comes with the fall of the Soviet Union. Using an uncle placed high in the former Red Army and now unemployed, Yuri comes into possession of more AK-47s, grenades, tanks and helicopters than he can ever sell, though his new client, the sociopath president of Liberia (Eammon Walker) pays in blood diamonds in between acts of barbarianism.

Yuri manages to con his hometown sweetheart – a one-time model and failed actress played convincingly well by Bridget Moynahan – into marrying him, but is also targeted by a do-good ATF agent (Ethan Hawke), who is driven to bring Yuri down, but conveniently for him, refuses to break the law in order to do it.

Written and directed by Andrew Niccol, Lord of War is great from the neck up. Niccol’s decision to comment on international arms trade via black comedy, instead of a straight forward gangster movie, didn’t attract an audience, but does provide several visually audacious sequences.

Along with the birth of a bullet, my favorite is a dynamite bit where Yuri’s cargo plane is intercepted in mid-air by Interpol, but instead of complying with the jets, he has the junk Russian pilot land on a dirt highway in Africa, where Yuri gives all his contraband away to the locals before the authorities can arrive.

Niccol has much research on international arms trafficking that he wants to share with the rest of the class, necessitating the voice-over by Cage, but Cage’s readings are so laconic that they play like a press conference by a real ATF agent. As opposed to a gangster movie, you’re never really rooting for this guy, or against him, just sort of nodding your head at approval of how much work went into this.

The sequence where Cage arrives at his uncle’s army base (shot in Czechoslovakia) to appraise the inventory involves a row of 100 tanks. I thought it was a CGI shot, but according to Niccol, they didn’t have the budget for that; it was easier to find the real arms dealer who actually owned that many tanks, and who was far more cooperative than the film studios, none of which wanted to bankroll the movie. The budget was raised overseas and the film released domestically by Lionsgate.

Niccol, who authored The Truman Show and wrote and directed two little seen films – Gattaca and S1m0ne – is good at crafting unusual worlds and exploring them in quirky, cerebral ways. Generally, this one is well cast, with Eammon Walker immensely charismatic as the lunatic dictator, and is pretty well written, with neat dialogue.

But Niccol ends up taking himself too seriously toward the end, with a needless title card proclaiming this was “based on true events” and fingering the U.S. as the biggest arms supplier in the world. It’s overkill, but before that even pops up, he never figured out a way to get me to care about any of these characters.