Here, Niccol goes for a hospital-grade dose of Heller-esque Catch 22 angry gallows humour. He wants you, children, to stop, and look at the toll the international arms trade is taking on the world, and how the drive for profit is tearing Africa apart. It's not the first film to come out of Hollywood in the past year to attempt vainly to steer the world's attention towards the continent whose continuing neglect and exploitation is contemporary humanity's greatest shame, and like the magnificent The Constant Gardener (a superior film to this), it has fared poorly at the box office as a result. With Darfur's genocide in slow motion too far gone now for any sort of redemption, and with countless neglected emergencies playing out daily, and inevitably ignored, we're destined to see these films grow in number and anger. Hey, they may not bring in the bucks but they do alright come awards time.

Cage is Yuri Orlov, a Brooklyn Ukrainian who sees the future in the arms trade as witness to a routine Russian mob shootout as a young man in Little Odessa. He and his brother Vitaly (Jared Leto) spend 20 or so years on an upbeat, hiply-soundtracked rise through the ranks of the international trade, starting out schlepping Uzis obtained from the local synagogue and ending up selling Soviet gunships to Liberian dictators. This is one of those roles for Cage that you can't imagine anybody else playing, even if he's doing his very best to simultaneously repulse and engage you.

Chasing our man Yuri like a terrier through all those years is Interpol agent Ethan Hawke, who does well to provide us with righteous speeches and useful statistics every time he gets near our slippery antihero. Yuri truly does not believe that he is a doer of evil things. If the guns were not to be sold by him, they would be sold by somebody else. He is not the angel of death, merely a supplier of her tools. Guns don't kill people, and etc. There's no real moral redemption on offer, either. This is far too bleak and cynical a film to hope for anything like salvation.

Niccol, as I said, is not a subtle filmmaker, and the tone here is often uneven. Long bows are drawn and risks are taken that don't always come off. He never seems entirely sure how to reconcile the humour of the dealer with the massacres of villages happening just out of frame. And sometimes Cage's stoned act is just plain annoying (as it tends to be in most of his films). However, sometimes this works brilliantly -- when a particularly nasty Liberian dictator executes one of his aides with no warning while testing Yuri's merchandise, the dealer doesn't miss a beat. "Now you'll have to buy it," he says. "It's a used gun". There is a scene here where Yuri watches a soldier firing an AK-47 with something like glee. As the casings fly from the gun, one by one, he hears a cash register ringing, over and over. In tone and style, it most strongly recalls Three Kings, another angry and criminally neglected satire of war and violence.

In the hands of any other filmmaker, the didactic speeches and angry statistics dripping from the mouths of the characters in this film would have turned me away. But Niccol has somehow managed to craft a film in which we witness the worst horrors of countless civil wars, witness a continent decimated by shrapnel and AIDS, and yet can still have Mazzy Star on the soundtrack. It is a brave man to try and tell this story this way, and he does save his killer punch til the last: his film may have focussed on how individual arms dealers exploit the poor, begetting and encouraging violence for the sake of profit, but his point is not that individuals can be evil. It is, of course, that the five biggest arms dealers in the world are the five permanent members of the UN security council. And though they may occasionally engage freelancers such as our Yuri (a fictional composite of five real-life dealers) when morality gets that little bit too murky, the bullets in the skulls of so many people, in so many wars, in Africa and elsewhere, have been manufactured and sold by the countries themselves. What, after all, could be more profitable than bullets so carelessly and frivolously and expensively fired?