"Selling guns is like selling vacuum cleaners." According to Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage), there are over 550 million firearms in circulation, sold by governments and individuals, to other governments and individuals, including warlords and drug dealers. Yuri looks at the business philosophically, or maybe just practically: If he wasn't making money off it, someone else would be. And besides, he's good at it.

The perverse center of Andrew Niccol's Lord of War, Ukrainian émigré Yuri sees himself as a good enough American, having absorbed the moral, political and legal lessons of his adopted home. He and his brother Vitaly (Jared Leto) grow up in Brooklyn's Little Odessa, scamming for money and status, passing as Jews, surrounded by violence. As the film skips through their childhoods, Yuri — personable and self-aware — assures you in a voiceover, "You don't have to worry: I'm not going to tell you a pile of lies to make me look good." Indeed, he seems comfortable exposing his basest inclinations, as when he realizes that dealing guns is an endlessly profitable line of work. And he does, he says, "have a natural instinct for smuggling contraband."

He puts this instinct to initial use during the Cold War, attending conventions where bikini-clad girlies help to hawk tanks and ordnance. He resolutely refuses to take sides, as they never seem to stick anyway; nations, including the United States, take up with allies who are most convenient and useful at any given moment. Yuri's "first break" comes after the terrorist bombing of the Marine base in Lebanon, when the U.S. leaves behind an array of munitions. Following the end of the Soviet Union, Yuri's uncle Dmitri (Eugene Lazarev) has access to much of the $32 billion worth of arms that go "missing." And so the entrepreneur leaps into the global not-so-black market (competing with a seller played by Ian Holm), backed by his compliant muscle, Vitaly.

While Yuri talks you through Lord of War, the film hardly assumes his perspective. Rather, it underlines his many moral missteps, beginning with his inability to deal with Vitaly's abrupt slide into drug addiction (Yuri drops him at a fancy rehab, with a goodbye toot and a promise that he'll meet movie stars) and including his longtime relationship with brutal Liberian warlord Andre Baptiste (Eamonn Walker, electric as he was in Oz). It is Baptiste's stereotypical refusal to put together proper English syntax that provides the film's title — he names Yuri a "lord of war," as culpable for Africa's persistent and pathological turmoil as any local leader.

Less effectively, the film sets Yuri against dogged, undeveloped Interpol agent Ryan (Ethan Hawke), who essentially embodies a legal system that has so little to say about international gun-running (except, really, to back off pursuit when it threatens national financial interests). Ryan serves a purpose, overtly and occasionally clunkily. Similarly schematic is Yuri's primary prize, literal supermodel Ava (Bridget Moynahan), first revealed in his version of events as a hometown dream girl and thus eternally locked in his memory as the ultimate object of desire. As he tells it, all his activities lead to his fantastical wooing process: His wealth allows him to arrange a make-believe photo shoot and book an island hotel in order to impress her. Of course, she doesn't "know" what he does for a living, and even when she seems at last to figure it out, she's unwilling (or maybe unable) to feel responsible.

While Yuri plainly gets off on risk — the threat of violence, the possibility of getting caught — he's also broadly representative of cavalier attitudes toward risk where vulnerable individuals and communities are concerned. As he refuses even to consider moral dimensions when making sales, he becomes something of an addict himself. While Vitaly craves cocaine and Ava youthful beauty and spotlights, he's hooked on the rush of violence. At first, this rush is based on the idea of violence, but when Baptiste forces him to commit a completely ruthless, intimate and bloody murder, Yuri suddenly is thrilled by the act itself.

Never subtle, Lord of War makes its argument — war is a business — by broad satire, indicting (at least) four permanent members of the U.N. Security Council as the world's leaders in selling firearms to "developing" countries. The fact that this is somewhat common knowledge means that the film's climax is not so much a surprise as it is a declaration. Angry and frustrated, it's part of a current surge of socially and politically conscious and accusatory films — including The Constant Gardener, the upcoming A History of Violence and Good Night, And Good Luck — that appear to be taking pages from last year's overtly "politicized" documentaries. Though Yuri thinks otherwise, taking sides is inevitable. Lord of War makes that much clear as can be.

Lord Of War Directed by Andrew Niccol A Lions Gate release Opens Friday at area theaters