After the action ends and before the credits roll, Lord of War offers a few finger-wagging factoids explaining the culpability of the U.S. and other permanent U.N. Security Council members in the proliferation of bloody genocides and insurgencies throughout recent history. All of a sudden, the whole shambolic tapestry of chaos and corruption that came before seems to be a case of black- and-white, one-way oppression. These titles betray the movie’s stance, not because it ever came out staunchly on the side of the provider nations, of course, but because until that point it had fiendishly had it both ways, nihilistically shimmying around complex hypocrisies with an arch smirk. Brimming with jet-black humor and shiny cynicism, it’s exactly this unexpected approach—treating perhaps the least funny topic on Earth (institutionalized mass murder and its cross-continental funding) with a sense of absurd levity—that makes Lord of War such a refreshing entry into the much written-about “Africa movie” genre. The film is unique because Nicolas Cage gleefully unloading a cargo plane of guns and ammunition on African children is played for laughs (“Don’t forget the bullets!”), while the titles at the end attempt to align it with Joaquin Phoenix in Hotel Rwanda solemnly reproaching common apathy (“They'll say, 'Oh, my God, how horrible,' and go back to eating their dinner.”)

Cage is Yuri Orlov, a loser raised in Little Odessa (laughably mythologized here to beet-stained, “authentic” perfection) who seeks an immediate, thrilling escape from his family’s restaurant and finds it in (mostly) illegal gun trading. The market has apparently been untapped by someone with his winning, overeager likeability, and soon he’s scheming to fuel gun-hungry armies in places as far from Brooklyn as San Salvador and the perpetually warring countries of Africa. Yuri enlists his brother (Jared Leto), a decent kid with a cocaine problem who serves as a stand-in for Yuri’s likewise muddled conscience, to help. From there, Orlov exploits his excess of slick car salesman charm and dry acumen to win the graces of a charming bastard of a warlord (Eamonn Walker) and dodge Ethan Hawke’s close-cropped Interpol agent, named Jack Valentine in case you weren’t having enough fun already. Soon enough, thanks to the film’s year-hopping briskness, Yuri’s a huge power player who continues to pull from his bottomless bullpen of twisty aphorisms (“Bullets change governments faster than votes”) all the way to the bank. There is also a largely regrettable romantic subplot featuring Bridget Moynahan as Yuri’s high school sweetheart turned wife; their wet-eyed, whispered scenes together are actorly and false but easy enough to overlook and even admire (if you care to reach)—their almost deliberate fakeness bolsters the puckish disingenuousness that’s part of the movie’s post-moralistic charm. It’s the same leeway you must give to accept the still fresh-faced Leto as Cage’s brother, and the fact that neither seem to age a day over the course of the movie’s 20 or so years.

Director Andrew Niccol has much to juggle here—taking on a Sorrow and the Pity­sized plot in two hours—but from the opening montage following a bullet from European factory to African skull (a sort of a prequel to Three Kings’s through-the-flesh x-ray segment), he handles it all with big-thinking agility. His fast-clip narrated detail work recalls the Scorsese of Goodfellas and Casino (just replace Las Vegas with two decades and several continents). Apart from Hawke and a kind of warm sentimentalization of characters’ past “humanity,” there’s little relation between Lord of War and Gattaca, Niccol’s best-known movie, a distinctly quiet and melancholy sci-fi that some overzealous fans critically coat with the same off-yellow filter that tinted the entire thing (not just its flashbacks). Lord of War seems to have sprung from a new, reenergized filmmaker, one who’s been learning new camera tricks and poring over war and weapons trade histories for the past couple years. The Niccol at work here is loud, not particularly subtle (Buffalo Springfield’s peace anthem “Hey What’s That Sound” accompanies the bullet sequence), and offensively hilarious, craftily earning the often misused “subversive” in his delivery of so many brazen moments and conceits in a big Hollywood production.

Cage continues to be a true Actor! actor, laying his mechanics bare and enjoying himself without distancing pretense. His Yuri Orlov marries the “I can eat a peach for hours” sleaziness of Castor Troy with the drunken hypocrisy of his Sergeant Joe Enders from Windtalkers, a nightmarish binge scene from which is essentially lifted here. The soft, ego-less touch required for romantic interaction still eludes him, but it’s compensated for with a drawling wit and convincing machismo in the scenes that actually matter. Walker offers fine support; with his blinding smile and love of a good joke, his Andre Baptiste is far more likable than a vicious, senselessly murdering warlord has any right to be, as per the film’s typical slipperiness.

If we accept that Lord of War’s concluding indictments are out of line with the playful cynicism that marks the majority of its outlook, the final question is: Is it morally acceptable to waffle or “poke fun” at the roots and causes of something as morbid as organized bloodletting? The recent documentary Darwin’s Nightmare, about the exchange in Tanzania of the locally destructive Nile perch fish for guns and ammo to be used in wars, dealt soberly with the grim fallout of such interaction. But even that movie mustered sympathy for the well-fed delivery pilots, who calmed themselves with the same “bigger evil” platitudes that Yuri spews and to which both films ultimately acquiesce. Lord of War’s agenda is no more or less valid, it’s simply different, and more versatile and entertaining—a welcome crime.