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.