Mercenaries & Soldiers of Fortune

Most mercenary stories let you enjoy the trade and feel clean about it afterward. Edward Zwick's Blood Diamond refuses. Leonardo DiCaprio's Danny Archer is a Rhodesian-born smuggler and ex-soldier who has long since decided Africa is a place that takes from you, so he takes back. The film puts him next to Djimon Hounsou's fisherman, a man with nothing to sell and everything to lose, and lets the contrast do the moral work.

What lifts it above the standard gun-for-hire picture is that it never lets Archer off the hook for being good at his job. His competence is the problem. The conflict-diamond trade runs on exactly his kind of expertise: men who can move through a war zone, cut a deal with a warlord, and never ask where the bodies went. The ending earns its sentiment because the film spent two hours showing you what that expertise actually costs.

Every other game in this list hands you a gun and tells you that you are the good kind of contractor. Far Cry 2 drops you into an unnamed African country at war with itself, working for both sides, watching your malaria flare up at the worst moments and your weapons jam and corrode in your hands. There is no clean faction. There is the Jackal, an arms dealer who keeps quoting Nietzsche at you, and there are two militias who will use you and discard you with equal ease.

Ubisoft built a world that actively resents you. Fire spreads unpredictably across the dry grass. Friendly mercenaries you have rescued will turn up later as enemies. The map is a map of a country, not a theme park, and crossing it is genuinely dangerous. It is the rare game that makes the soldier-of-fortune fantasy feel like the trap it actually is, which is exactly why it is still argued about more than its glossier sequels.

Television found a clever loophole. To make audiences root for soldiers of fortune week after week, you give them a code: take the money, but only from people who deserve help, and never quite kill anyone. The A-Team ran four soldiers wrongly convicted of a crime they did not commit, now for hire to the desperate, and made the contractor lifestyle look like the most fun a man could have with a welding torch and a van.

The modern descendants dropped the cartoon and kept the unit. Strike Back and SAS Rogue Heroes treat the operators as professionals first and patriots second, men who would do this work for whoever was paying if the paperwork were different. Generation Kill and Fauda go further still, sitting inside the discipline and the boredom and the sudden violence until the line between the trained soldier and the freelance one blurs into the same hard stare.

Most of this genre is about the man pulling the trigger. Andrew Niccol's Lord of War is about the man who sold him the gun. Nicolas Cage plays Yuri Orlov, an arms dealer who narrates his own rise with the flat amorality of a salesman who has decided the product is not his problem. The famous opening, following a single bullet from a factory to the head it ends up in, is the whole thesis in ninety seconds.

It belongs here because the mercenary and the arms dealer are two ends of the same business. One supplies the violence, the other supplies the means, and both have constructed elaborate reasons why the consequences belong to someone else. Cage plays Orlov as a man who genuinely believes he is just meeting demand, which is somehow more chilling than any villain twirling a moustache. The film never lets you forget that the convoy in every other story on this page was loaded by someone exactly like him.