The Notorious Mr. Bout

It's hard to feel too much sympathy for Viktor Bout, a cargo plane operator who made his fortune by flying planes to places where no-one else wanted to go and for people who no-one else wanted to fly for: his protests that it's not his responsibility that they put arms in his planes doesn't really cut much mustard. That it took an entrapment operation to put him in gaol says more about the west's usual tolerance of arms traders than it does for Bout's moral innocence. Still, this is an entertaining documentary, in part because Bout recorded just about everything he did on video, so if you want to see what it's like to start up an airline, fly into the heart of Africa and turn up in the middle of a brutal civil war, the film can actually show you, and Bout seems to be enjoying himself with a kind of schoolboy enthusiasm. And if it just happened there were guns in his plane... well that, says the notorious Mr. Bout, was nothing to do with me.

Dubbed "the merchant of death," Viktor Bout was many things: an arms dealer, a media celebrity, and an amateur film maker. After years of infamy he was finally arrested in 2011 after falling victim to a C.I.A. sting operation.

What does one look for in a documentary? For me, I look for a film that makes me really think critically about the subject of the film. I felt that at the end of "The Notorious Mr. Bout," I felt no emotion towards the subject of the film; I felt neither sympathy nor condemnation for Mr. Bout, he was merely a mildly interesting character.

"The Notorious Mr. Bout" was an interesting, but ultimately a boring film. There seemed to be a lot of potential however due to the the seeming poor direction and uninteresting interviews the quality of the documentary suffered greatly. One would think that a movie about one of the biggest arms dealers would be fascinating, especially when in the description of the movie they reveal that they show lots of footage from Mr. Bout's own personal films. Yet the documentary portrays him as an extremely boring person who possessed so much hubris that he walked into an obvious trap set up by the C.I.A.

I think the film would have been far more enjoyable had they condensed the information into a shorter, maybe one hour film rather than an hour and a half film as it is now. It seemed almost as if they were trying to fill a certain time slot on TV and so they stretched out the footage into a repetitive one and a half hour documentary.

Jailed for twenty-five years for arms dealing in 2011, Viktor Bout became a media celebrity as the so-called "Merchant of Death," dealing in arms across the globe and thereby contributing to the continuation of bloody civil wars in the Congo, Angola and Rwanda, amongst others. When finally arrested as a result of a deliberately staged "hit" operation, Bout was agreeing to a deal that could have resulted in American civilians being slaughtered.

Tony Gerber and Maxim Pozdorovkin's documentary profiles Bout, an entrepreneur of quite extraordinary aptitude, who built up his business empire in the wake of the liberalization policies introduced by Boris Yeltsin in Russia during the 1990s. Bout's primary interest, it seems, was in cargo; bringing in hitherto unobtainable commodities into Russia while transporting other goods from place to place. He set up his sphere of operations in Sharjah, where be built up a huge empire. It did not matter what was transported; Bout built his reputation on flying goods expeditiously using his own fleet of airplanes.

As the Nineties progressed, so Bout expanded his operations into some of the trouble-spots of Africa. He had a small airport in the Congo in the midst of civil war operations; and enjoyed good relationships with military leaders all over the continent. The documentary works hard to portray him as a business person interested solely in making money, but it seems that he was largely indifferent to the morality of arms-dealing.

What makes THE NOTORIOUS MR. BOUT most interesting is the amount of home movie footage Bout shot during his business career. Everything, it seemed, was worth filming, from rebuilding his aircraft to the most ordinary domestic scenes such as the birth of his daughter. We get the sense that his real desire was for some form of celebrity; to be remembered for what he did, regardless of why he did it.

In the end Bout achieved his aim as he was deported from Thailand to New York to face a high-profile trial. Through interviews with Bout's wife Alla, as well as some of his closest business associates, the documentary works hard to suggest that Bout was more sinned against than sinning; there are legions of arms-dealers from all countries who are still at large and making huge profits out of other people's suffering. Nonetheless we feel that the prison sentence he received was somehow justified, if only as a means to show what would happen to any arms-dealer, whether great or small, should they be brought to justice.

Slickly filmed with the use of voice artists speaking some of Bout's words, THE NOTORIOUS MR. BOUT is an entertaining piece.