The movie follows arms trafficker Yuri Orlov's meteoric rise to the top of his profession. Yuri, played perfectly by Nicholas Cage, is the ambitious son of Ukranian immigrants whose desire to escape the banality of New York's Little Odessa leads him to the hyper-violent war zones of post-Cold War West Africa - "the edge of Hell," quips Yuri. There, he dodges bullets and Interpol agents while delivering planeloads of weapons to a sociopathic dictator. After each sale, Yuri returns to his multimillion dollar Manhattan condo, his fashion model wife, and their young son. Yuri's transition between the two worlds is seamless, as is the ethical compartmentalization that allows him to exist in both: "Cars and cigarettes kill more people than guns," "I simply give people the means to defend themselves," etc. Slowly the corrosive depravity of Yuri's vocation eats away at this bifurcated morality and he succumbs to the vices that his weapon sales indirectly cultivate - prostitution, drug addiction, and murder.