211 (2018)

This was originally covered on episode 192 of the podcast, "Nepo Babies," which we did with Will from Exploding Helicopter, and I figured it was time to get it up on the site, especially since we want to get more Cage on here. In addition to us, Mitch from the Video Vacuum has covered this as well.

211 is a collision course to wackiness type affair, where a gang of mercenaries who want money that's being held in a bank in a small Boston suburb--err Sophia backlot--happen to rob it at the same time that two local police officers, Nicolas Cage and his son-in-law Dwayne Cameron, are in the area with their teenage ride-along, Michael Rainey Jr., who is stuck doing this ride-along because he committed the offense of "going to a rich private school while black." All hell breaks loose, and it doesn't get any better when we have a secondary thread following an Interpol agent played by Adrian Mutu's ex-wife, Alexandra Dinu. Can Cage save the day, and the movie?

He was able to save the day at least, and as Meatloaf once said "one out of two ain't bad." This movie hits all the spots of bad 2010s DTV featuring a big, one-time Hollywood star. Convoluted plot? Check. Eastern European location doubling for a US town? Check. The one-time Hollywood star playing a grizzled something or other? Check. The daughter of said one-time Hollywood's star's character played by a thin young woman with long hair, who wears jeans and flannel shirts, and has a difficult relationship with said one-time Hollywood's star's character? Check. Younger son-like character along for the ride? Check. Baddies who look like they were pulled from a Vegas night club on the weekend of a UFC event? Check. After we tick off all of those boxes, what are we left with? One moment where Cage goes off, and one fun moment where his actual son, Weston Cage, who's one of the baddies, has his dad in his sniper scope, but unfortunately they don't do more with it. The only realistic element of the movie is the fact that a young black male would be caught up in the system in a predominantly white Massachusetts suburb because he was trying to defend himself from white bullies in his school, and that the police officers he's doing the ride-along with wouldn't bother to ask about it and just treat him like a felon--and to that point, the moment where Cage does ask Rainey Jr. what happened was probably less realistic, I can't see real police officers caring either way. The other thing is, there are a lot of threads that never go anywhere. We meet the bank manager (Millennium mainstay Velizar Binev), and find out it's his anniversary. Very touching, only he gets a bullet to the dome by one of the baddies, and that's it. Why are we meeting him then? And while it's fun to reminisce about early 2000s European football, why is Alexandra Dinu's character in this, except as an Adrian Mutu conversation starter--and I must confess, I didn't know she was his ex-wife, Will told us on the podcast, but it opens up all kinds of doors for conversation, all of them more interesting than this movie. So maybe that's the best bet here, watch this with some friends who like DTV movies and European football, and let the tangents fly once Dinu appears on-screen.

This is now seven Cage films on the site, which doesn't seem like a lot considering how much he has out there for DTV stuff. The reason for this is he doesn't really get into the DTV world in earnest until about 2014, and that was about when I started my unplanned hiatus. If you look in the archives, in 2013 I had 96 reviews, and then in 2014 it's all the way down to 9, and in 2015 7, and then nothing until I came back in 2019. In 2014 he starts pumping these things out, doing like 2 or 3 a year, and this film here is right in the middle of that. By my count, there are over 30 DTV movies of his we haven't done yet, which would make him an automatic Hall of Famer if we did them all. It's an intriguing thought, and had I not gone on that unplanned hiatus, he'd probably already be in, because I would've been reviewing films like this that whole time. The other interesting thing I noticed, when you look at review counts on IMDb, they've been going down over time for most DTV flicks. For example, Bruce Willis had Acts of Violence come out the same year, and it had 38 critic review, compared to this film's 46. Then fast forward to 2023, where Willis's last film, Assassin, only had 23 critic reviews, while two films for Cage that year, Butcher's Crossing and The Old Way, had 55 and 63 critic reviews respectively, and some of his newer ones have even more. The Cage appeal and fascination never quite dimmed like it did for Willis and others like him--take 2022's Savage Salvation, which only has 19 critic reviews, despite having Robert De Niro in it--and now that we're seeing a Cage resurgence, it'll be interesting to see how many more of these DTV flicks he does, or if this will be a career capsule of 10 years and 30+ films, of which we had some real stinkers like this one, and some real gems like Pig.

As I mentioned above, the theme of the podcast episode I did with Will was "Nepo Babies," and the one in question here was Weston Cage, though Nicolas Cage is a nepo baby himself, being Francis Ford Coppola's nephew. (The other film we did was Dangerous, with Clint Eastwood's son Scott, a film I'm not sure if we'll review on here.) I think part of the draw for Nicolas Cage with this movie was that he could work with his son, even if they don't have any scenes together, and I can't fault him with that. And to Weston's credit, he does well enough as one of the baddies--though I think the scene of him smoking should've been cut, he didn't look natural smoking at all. Why not have him eat a sandwich instead? It's interesting that I'm writing this as the world has chosen a new pope--and you may think that as an American I'm excited by the first American pope, but he was part of the priest abuse cover-up, and I feel like we all missed out on not having a pope named Pizzaballa, which is a sign to me that the Catholic church is still behind the times--but anyway, the term "nepotism" came from the practice of popes in medieval Italy promoting their nephews--and "nephews," aka kids they fathered when they were supposed to be celibate--to high positions, so they could then be popes themselves. We see it in a lot of society, but in the acting world it's more glaring I think. I mean, would Weston Cage be in this film if he wasn't his father's son? And while Nicolas Cage has proven to be one of his generation's best actors, even if he changed his name so it wouldn't look like he was riding his famous uncle's coattails, none of it hurt, and probably at least greased the skids a bit so he could meet and network with the right people. On top of that, Will brought up the fact that as a nepo baby, these young actors have a safety net other people breaking into the business don't have the luxury of. They're not waiting tables or taking parts in ads for IBS meds to get work. If you factor that element in with the unforgiving economy we have, we'll probably see more nepo babies as the years go on, and they may take over the industry, the way upper-middle class children have taken over journalism in the US, because they're the only ones whose parents could support them through the unpaid internships that are part of the early stages of a journalist's career.

We have a new tag, and a new almost 40 Club member! Dian Hristov is the stunt coordinator, and I recognized his name as a Seagal stunt double in Belly of the Beast, so I thought I'd dig into his IMDb bio. Turns out he's done stunt work on almost 40 films we've reviewed here on the site! This is in large part due to the fact that he works with Millennium Films, and we've reviewed tons of their movies. And it's not just Seagal films. A lot of Dolph and a lot of Van Damme too, plus Isaac Florentine--who also produced this film, which is why he's tagged here. When you look at our October line up, we have a packed Hall of Fame class already, and while with him almost in the 40 Club, we can't not include him, we're already inducting Cole S. McKay, so he may have to wait until 2026. This begs another question: why isn't Millennial Films in the Hall of Fame? They have over 60 tags, plus a bunch more that I haven't tagged because I stopped keeping track. The short answer is, I don't know, but at least we'll get Hristov in eventually. Unlike Camacho, McKay, and Razatos, who worked in the 80s and 90s, and made the 90s the greatest DTV decade ever, Hristov is part of the DTV world's shift in the 2000s, but he helped make that a fun decade, and seems to have done his darndest to make the 2010s a little better too, despite where the market was going at that time. Here's to you Mr. Hristov, you're one of the greats.

Finally, you know if I teased Adrian Mutu in the opening paragraph, I was going to dedicate our penultimate paragraph to him, so here we are. In the early 2000s when I first had my own apartment out of college, I added the Fox Soccer Channel to my cable package, which meant every weekend I could watch my Arsenal and however many other Premier League teams every weekend. That was when I was introduced to Mutu, who was playing with Chelsea in the early 2000s, though what I remember more wasn't him playing for Chelsea, but the Sky Sports simulcasts on Mondays on Fox Soccer, where they updated us on his various scandals. He then went to Juventus, was part of two scudetto winning clubs, and then had those titles subsequently revoked as part of the Calciopoli scandal. The thing was, Serie A wasn't broadcast on Fox Soccer until later in the 2000s, when he was with Fiorentina, which was when I remembered him more. It's a name I hadn't thought of in maybe 15 years, so to have a 2018 DTV movie I'm discussing on the podcast be the thing that brings him back up is fantastic--and the fact that it wasn't on an episode with Scott Murphy from All 90s Action, All the Time, where we're known for having tangents on European football--and in fact have discussed Mutu's countryman, Gheorghe Hagi on a couple of occasions--is even more astounding. And this wasn't a tangent Will and I were on either, he brought it up as a notable fact about the film, which is even crazier. You just never know where these DTV films will take you.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently this is on a variety of streamers here in the States, including Plex, Fawesome, and the Roku Channel, so if you're interested, you can check this out in one of those places. I don't know that it's worth it though. What is worth it is checking out the pod episode Will and I did on this, number 192 in the archives, titled "Nepo Babies."

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4976192

And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Pig (2021)

Back in August I had Mitch from The Video Vacuum on to discuss Nicolas Cage, and I thought this would be a good film to chat about. I didn't know a lot about it, beyond that it was on Hulu, and Mitch had reviewed it for his site and liked it. Turns out this movie was kind of a big deal, and while it fits my under $10 million at the box office rule, the indie art house feel maybe isn't what the site is about. That's when I came up with the idea of using some of these off-podcast Tuesdays as a bit of the Wild Card I used to do in the past. We'll see how it goes, starting with this one.

Pig has Nicolas Cage as a hermit living out in the woods who uses a pig to find truffles, which he sells to a young restaurateur. Unfortunately, a couple meth tweakers kidnap her, and Cage, with the help of the restaurateur, needs to go into the restaurant underbelly of Portland, OR to track her down. Along the way, we learn more about Cage's character's past, and what he meant to the Portland restaurant scene. The young restaurateur's father, played by Adam Arkin, turns out to be a heavy hitter in the Portland restaurant industry. What does he have to do with the missing pig? And how will Cage confront him?

(Keep in mind that I can't get into this film without spoilers, so if you haven't seen this yet, read on at your own risk--or take a break, watch Pig, and then come back.)

I thought this was a fantastic movie, but what I thought really worked, in talking it over with Mitch, was how the film used an anti-action approach to the action. In fact, the only real action sequence was when Cage's character is beaten up by a restaurant worker in this underground game, but the aggression on Cage's end was in taking the beating. We have other sequences where, in a standard action film the hero would be using physical violence to get what he needs, but Cage's character uses a kind of emotional violence. Like a scene where he's at another fancy restaurant, talking to his former sous chef who ran the place. In an action movie, he might slam the guy's head into the table, maybe twist his arm behind his back, and get him to talk. In this film though, he knows the character's emotional weak point: that he wanted to own a small corner pub, and he hits that point aggressively, in a way that forces the sous chef to breakdown and tell him what he needs--he emotionally deconstructs the sous chef the way the chef served deconstructed dishes at his fancy restaurant. Then for the final confrontation, Cage gives the young restaurateur (Alex Wolff) a list of items, the way the hero in an action movie would be gathering arms or setting up his traps to defeat the baddie; but Cage uses the items he asks for to recreate a meal with Arkin that, again, is emotionally aggressive and causes Arkin to break. Considering all the action films we do, this idea of "anti-action," or "anti-physical aggression action," is really fascinating, and it was cool to see how well it was executed.

A big part of why it worked was Cage's performance. With me not knowing what this movie was about, I thought this would just be a fun, quirky Cage as a hermit role, which probably would've worked well enough for me; but Cage takes this role and gives us something much more. This is now Cage's sixth film on the DTVC, and I think this is his best work out of those--Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans though was a great one too. When we went on our unplanned hiatus in 2015, there was a thought that Cage was going to be another DTVC Hall of Famer, it was just a matter of time, but this is the first film of his we've done since I've been back, and I don't know how many of his DTV flicks that we'll get to, in part because a lot of the roles he's done since the mid-2010s seem like they might be more indie flicks like this than the DTV flicks we're used to on the site. Maybe that'll change, or maybe I'll find more to go to--one good future Wild Card is Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, that felt more like a DTV film than this, but also grossed over $150 million worldwide. Either way, this was the Cage I loved from the 90s turning in a stirring performance that reminded me why I love watching him so much.

One area that I initially had trouble with was the fact that we find out at the end that the pig died, but I read into it some more, and found out that this film could be inspired by Greek mythology, and that Arkin's character was acting as the Hades. It explains a lot, and with that in mind I'm more okay with it. We find out that Cage went into seclusion after losing his wife, and in a way, the search for the pig could be like a metaphor for him going into the underworld to save his companion, when really it was letting go of the wife that was preventing him from living. I don't know enough about Greek mythology to get it all for sure, but metaphorically, I was better able to accept that the pig had died, and while I liked the pig and wanted her to live, I don't know that I would've gotten the movie I wanted with that kind of ending. Also, if Adam Arkin was playing Hades as a powerful restaurant mogul, he did a great job, both stoic and cold, but stern and fair.

We harp on runtime a lot, not just me, but also a lot of fellow reviewers in this ecosystem. What we're really harping on when we say that is padding or bad pacing that causes us to be disinterested: why give us two hours when you can get it done in 88 minutes? In the trivia for this, we found out the distributors had director Michael Sarnoski cut an hour out, meaning this 92-minute gem was originally supposed to be a 152-minute behemoth? The thing is, this 92-minute production feels like the perfect length. Nothing is wasted, the pace is good and deliberate, and I don't know that we lost anything by not having anything in that additional hour. Had this been the original 152-minutes, I never would've considered it for the podcast, but I also don't know that it would've worked anywhere near as well. For the people who think we're too hyper-focused on runtimes, maybe we're onto something.

Finally, choosing the Portland, OR restaurant scene for the setting was fantastic. The rainy weather could double for Hades's underworld, but also the idea that the city that was the inspiration for Portlandia could have this kind of dark underbelly was perfect. It was uniquely Portland. I've only been to Portland, OR once, on a day trip while I was visiting my sister, who was living in Seattle at the time. I got some Voodoo Donuts, and visited Powell's Books and a black velvet painting museum that had been featured on No Reservations. I remember we went to a pizza place, and I ordered two slices, and the kid behind the counter cracked "you need a box for one of those?" as if there was no way I could finish two of their "big" pizza slices in one setting. Of course me, the brash Northeasterner, not only said no, but after I ate my two slices, I went up and got a third, which didn't matter as much because the original guy's shift was over so he was gone, but I felt like I still needed to prove a point. Anyway, that's Portland in a nutshell, as best as I can tell, and I'm not sure what that says about this film being set there, but as I watched this, the whole thing felt like the vibe of Voodoo Donuts, black velvet painting museums, and clerks who crack foxy about how many slices of pizza they think you can eat in one setting.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently catch this on Hulu. If you've read this far but haven't seen it yet, you may not want to now knowing how the film ends; but I think for the Cage performance, and for the way this film depicts an "anti-physical aggression" form of violence, it's worth checking out.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11003218

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, Holtman Arms, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

The Frozen Ground (2013)

This is one I noticed on Instant a while back and really wanted to check out, especially because it has Nicolas Cage and John Cusack. What happened though was Jamie and I had done Killing Season for the pod, and we both felt we needed a break from "90s-00s big name star does DTV". So we took about eight weeks and looked at some other films-- plus I got married--and then came back to it.  Let's see how it went.

The Frozen Ground is based on the true story of Alaskan serial killer Robert Hansen (Cusack). In it we follow the story of Cindy Paulson (played by Vanessa Hudgens), and Det. Jack Halcolme (Cage). Cage is trying to crack the case of this serial killer, and Hudgens is the one woman who got away from the serial killer, making her the key to bringing him down. It's a race against time as Cage tries to lock him up before he kills again.

We both enjoyed this one, and it worked on a lot of levels. First, it's not your usual serial killer film that tells the story from serial killer's point of view. In fact, Hansen's part in the film is smaller, and it's a credit to Cusack that he does so well with that small part to make it seem bigger. Second, speaking of Cusack, he, Cage, and Hudgens all turn in great performances which makes the film work that much more. Without good performances we might as well watch the Robert Hansen hour-long bio on the ID channel, and this film and these actors give us a reason to watch this instead. Finally, it has a lot of great supporting characters played by myriad character actors that we saw throughout the 90s and 2000s that really gave the film a feel like it was a Hollywood flick made in 2001 instead of DTV in 2013, among them Michael McGrady, Kevin Dunn, and Kurt Fuller. My one complaint was that we had some deal with 50 Cent as a pimp that felt grafted in and bogged the film down for me, but Jamie wasn't as annoyed by it as I was, so maybe that's just me and my "anything over 90 minutes is bad" issues.

Let's start with Mr. Cage. We joke about him often, and he's become sort of an Internet meme and butt of jokes, but this film really took me back to that late 90s/early 2000s Cage who was at the top of his game and the king of Hollywood. From the moment it starts he gives us a guy we can root for and want to see win. There's nothing gimmicky or quirky about this character, and he never goes off the rails, he just gives a solid, earnest performance, and the film is better for it. I don't know where this Cage has been, and I'm not saying I don't love the quirky or over-the-top Cage, it's just good to have this mixed in every once in a while.

As I said above, Cusack is also great as the serial killer. He has this way in his limited screen time of giving us the three sides of all serial killers: innocuous, popular local man whom no one would ever suspect; sick fiend who craves power and dominance over women to the point of committing these heinous crimes; and then cowering wimp who can't handle when the power dynamic has changed and Cage as the police detective is in control. Cusack gives us all so effortlessly and naturally, it's scary. Unlike Cage, who probably would have done the part he had if this had been made in the 2000s, I don't know if Cusack's agent would have let him play the serial killer, because of the kind of role it was.

Let's get back to this idea of what the film would have been in 2000 versus 2013. Overall this would have been a big screen Hollywood release that would have turned around and made huge money in DVD (and still VHS at that time as well) rentals and TV licensing. By 2006 it would have been a TNT "New Classic," in heavy rotation with films like Kiss the Girls, US Marshals, and Domestic Disturbance, and my mom would have passively left it on after a Law and Order episode on a lazy Saturday. On the one hand, a 2000 theatrical release would have meant a longer runtime, more padding, and probably a larger focus on Cusack and Cage. More cat and mouse, more thrill--in short, not the movie we got here. Maybe 2013 was the time to make this film, and we're lucky for that.

Finally, we always talk about our morbid fascination with serial killers, and what I liked about this film is that it wasn't that. One scene I really loved was when Cage has Hudgens stay at his home, and his wife, played by Radha Mitchell, is upset about that. Later she comes around and realizes that was wrong of her, but it also illustrated a great point: we as a society can have a morbid fascination with serial killers because we have that luxury. Like Radha Mitchell's character, we can shut our eyes and go back to our own lives, because serial killers happen out there to other people, and what Mitchell's character was upset about initially was that her husband was turning "other people" into "them." What this film tells us is that there are people who don't have the luxury of going back to their own lives, who don't have the luxury of a morbid fascination with serial killers. These people are their victims and the victim's families. They don't get to just watch the show on ID, or post pics of John Wayne Gacy in a clown suit on Tumblr, then change the channel or close their browser and have everything be okay. Radha Mitchell's character realizes also that her husband, due to the line of work he chose, also doesn't have the luxury of serial killers only happening to "other people," and without him doing his job a man like Hansen is never brought to justice. The film finishes this thought off by giving us a picture of each victim in the credits, as opposed to showing Hansen.

Again, The Frozen Ground was a yes from both of us. This is the Cage and Cusack you were accustomed to in the late-90s/early 2000s, only now it's without the bells and whistles of a big screen Hollywood production, which I think makes it that much better. Definitely worth checking out while it's on Instant. And you can always check out the pod on most major podcatchers. Find the links in the sidebar.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2005374/

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Trespass (2011)

We start this week of big screen stars in DTV flicks with Trespass, a Joel Schumacher directed suspense thriller starring Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman. I first got wind of this one when our buddy Simon at Explosive Action sent me an e-mail with a link to an article about it being Direct to Video-- which isn't entirely true, it had a very, very short theatrical run followed by a quick turn around onto video, but close enough. The article also discussed if this meant the beginning of the end for Cage and Kidman as far as carrying a film in the modern movie market. I think this is more of a blip, at least for Cage, but we'll see.

Trespass has Cage as a very wealthy diamond dealer who lives in a very nice house with his wife, Nicole Kidman, and teenage daughter. Their world is turned upside-down when a group of thugs break in and hold the family hostage, looking for millions of dollars in diamonds they think he has. Cage is a little wilier than they expect though, and things begin to unravel as loyalties are tested and nerves are wracked. Who will get the upper hand in this deadly game of cat and mouse?



Though this isn't a great movie, the quality isn't why this wasn't given more theatrical support. Maybe it had more to do with Schumacher as director than anything, and I'll get to that in a bit, but this doesn't look much worse than a lot of the mediocre paint-by-numbers thrillers we see populating big screens in this country. Yes, there are too many double crosses and twists, but isn't that what happens in every suspense yarn? My biggest issue with it was that they had great talents in Cage, Kidman, and one of my new favorites, Ben Mendelsohn, but they leaned too heavily on Cam Gigandet, who, for my money, is just the heel in a teen movie. You want to put him in Twilight, fine; but you put him in with these actors, and give him a character with too much nuance, it's a little beyond his pay grade, and as a result, the end product suffers. Do I want a teen movie heel mean mugging it and acting tough with Ben Mendelsohn? Not after I've seen Mendelsohn in Animal Kingdom I don't. Still, with that aside, this was good enough to get a big theatrical release, it was just one those ones that slipped through the cracks and ended up DTV.

This isn't the first time we've seen Mr. Cage here at the DTVC. Back when I did box office bomb posts, we looked at Bangkok Dangerous. Then, when we did our series of bad comic book movies, I reviewed Ghost Rider. Finally, when I did Friday wild card posts, I looked at Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call-- New Orleans. (Man, I used to run a lot of gimmicks here, huh?) I'm sure in those other posts I've mentioned this, but it bears repeating, Cage's movie rap sheet is pretty prodigious. Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas-- one of my top 10 of the 90s--, multiple nine-figure grossing flicks, and at one time the distinction of being one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood. If you look at his recent flicks, while there's definitely a drop at the gate, I don't know that he's slipping into any kind of DTV-dom anytime soon. Another thing you can look at is his propensity to mix in projects like this that won't make a lot of money. It's as if he does his Family Man and Knowing so he can afford to make his Bad Lieutenant and Trespass.



Nicole Kidman has a similar rap sheet. Also an Oscar winner, and up until about 2008's Australia she commanded about $15 million per picture, making her one of Hollywood's most expensive leading ladies. That year's important, because in 2007 she turned 40, and we all know Hollywood doesn't like its leading ladies north of 40. It seems then, based on her imdb bio, that she's playing the lead in films like this and Rabbit Hole-- for which she was nominated again for an Oscar, and one of my favorites of 2010--, then taking supporting parts in bigger grossing pics like the Billy Madison-style Adam Sandler romp Just Go with It. Hollywood's loss is our gain though, because she was great here, looking as stunning as ever, and showing that she hasn't lost her ability to carry a film as one of its leads.

Joel Schumacher has been much vituperated against for a lot of his big budget films, especially Batman and Robin (another that we did during our comic book series) and everything after it. It's after the Jim Carey silly-fest 23 though that he appears to split from Hollywood and start out on his own, working with more indie outfits with smaller budgets. If you look at his imdb bio, he actually discusses the problems with working in the current big Hollywood climate where all the major studios are owned by massive corporate conglomerates-- a problem that we movie bloggers know all too well with the power those massive conglomerates wielded in trying to get SOPA passed. I think that's what we're looking at here then, Schumacher making a film that he expects will make its money in DVD sales and video rentals, because he doesn't want to go through the traditional channels and deal with his work being controlled by those big conglomerates. That's a very important distinction from the usual mindset that DTV means someone's career is on the decline, and something that might be a benefit to us in the DTV world in the future, as more film makers and actors look to work outside the massive corporatization of Hollywood.



I can't wrap this post without mentioning Ben Mendelsohn. He was absolutely chilling in Animal Kingdom, every scene he was in was just dripping with menace. I was a little disappointed here, not with him, but with the way his character was written, because it's kind of all over the place, and betrays a lot of what he builds up early on. I'm sure my Aussie readers are much more familiar with him than I am, but based on what I've seen, I'm a big fan. There's a couple other people I want to mention too. Dash Mihok play a member of the gang, and he's great. Just a one-note tough with a sadistic streak, but he plays it well. The other is Jordana Spiro, who plays Mendelsohn's drugged out girlfriend. You probably remember her from the TBS sitcom My Boys, but I'll always remember her from the MTV late night soap Undressed. Remember that show? Why don't they make TV like that anymore?

Anyway, I better wrap it up, because this post has been long enough. If you're looking for the demise of Cage and Kidman into the depths of DVD-dom, you won't find it here. On the other hand, you won't find anything all that remarkable beyond some solid performances from Cage, Kidman, and Mendelsohn. This is pretty paint-by-numbers, and while it's not worse than a lot of the stuff that in theaters now, it's also not much better either. If you're curious though, in the States it's currently available on Watch Instantly.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1674784/

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans (2009)

When I reviewed the Abel Ferrara/Harvey Keitel Bad Lieutenant back in August of 2008, this newer Werner Herzog-directed film starring Nicolas Cage was still in development. I ended up missing it when it played at our local indie theater, but luckily Netflix shipped it out to me the day it was released on DVD. Netflix rules! And just in time for our Wild Card post this week.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans isn't quite the movie the other Bad Lieutenant was. Both had drug addicted police lieutenants that get in over their heads with gambling debts and what not, but that's where the similarities end. In this one, Nicloas Cage plays a cop who injures his back saving a criminal from a flooded holding cell during the aftermath of Katrina. He's promoted to lieutenant for his sacrifice, but is also prescribed a cocktail of pain relievers, which leads him down the primrose path to addiction. As his myriad ways of obtaining drugs start to catch up with him and the net is closing in, he finds an unlikely ally in the crime lord he'd been trying to take down for the slaying of a family of five.

I liked this, I don't know if I'd say a lot, but I liked it. There were scenes and images I liked a lot, but the film as a whole had some issues. The end was kind of odd to me, for one thing. Obviously I can't get into that without giving the film away, so maybe someone else who's seen it can either back me up or tell me I'm crazy. Herzog's direction really worked, and he and Cage had a great actor/director chemistry. I'm not sure I can choose between this one or the Ferrara/Keitel one either, because they're so different. While Ferrara's direction made me think of French New Wave, Herzog's made me think of... well... Herzog. A better script would have made it great.

One thing I can say about this, is it's worth ten National Treasures in artistic merit, but it's not worth a hundredth of a National Treasure in terms of earning potential. I think that's why it's so hard to judge Nicolas Cage based on The Weather Man or Knowing, because those sacks of asscrack pay the bills; and if we're realistic, take a lot less work to accomplish as an actor than Bad Lieutenant: PC-NO. A lot of my friends say to me all the time how they can't stand Cage, and I used to agree, until I revisited Leaving Las Vegas last fall, and was reminded of what made Cage great. His role here will remind you again.

Klaus Kinski is a member of our DTVC Hall of Fame, and though we've left him for a bit to look at other actors, it's important to bring him up if we're talking about Werner Herzog. Are they the best actor/director pairing of all time? I think some much better cases could be made for Kurosawa/Mifune or Scorsese/De Niro, so probably no. Are they the most intriguing pair of all time? I think you could look at the five films they've done together and answer yes. But it wasn't really those films I had in my mind as I watched this, it was another of Herzog's: a documentary called Grizzly Man. It was just this window into how Herzog sees the world, and puts a film like Bad Lieutenant: PC-NO into perspective--this idea that the wild is vicious and deadly, and humans that veer too far in that direction face dire consequences. I was kind of upset, because there are some scenes in the film (again, I won't give them away) that I would've liked to known Herzog's thought process on, but this DVD didn't have any director's commentary--it didn't have any commentary for that matter.

One thing evident in the Kinski/Herzog films though, is that it's Herzog who gets Kinski, not the other way around--I can't imagine Kinski would've cared to get Herzog, or anyone else for that matter. In Bad Lieutenant: PC-NO, something different happens: Cage seems to get what Herzog is about, and he works in that realm. It makes this a very different film from those other five. There wasn't that sense of struggle, and I think Herzog needs that when he works. Again, there was no commentary, but I can't imagine Cage was giving him anywhere near the hard time Kinski always did; and oddly enough, I think that harmony affected the film. Herzog tried to convey conflict on the screen in a variety of ways, but I'm not so sure it's something that can always be manufactured if the feeling off set is too harmonious.

Finally, you'd think with Eva Mendes in the film, it would be her that I'm talking about as the hottest woman in the film, and though she was hot, it was Fairuza Balk in only one scene who stood out. This is one area where a foreign director who lives by his own rules like Herzog can really turn some of our preconceived notions upside-down. The average American director looks to Balk for their goth chick or scary chick. Herzog saw something else, and he went with it, resulting in this scene where Balk's character thinks she's going to have sex with Cage, is seductively crawling over him in bed in her underwear and police boots, only to find out he's too wasted and is only there with her to find out how she can get him drugs from the Louisiana Highway Patrol evidence locker. Without her being as hot as she is in that scene, we have no idea how far gone Cage is, and it all works perfectly.

I think most of my readers would enjoy this. Best way to know: if you hated National Treasure, you'll like Bad Lieutenant: PC-NO. I also think, if you're a big fan of the Ferrara/Keitel version, you should watch this. It's no cheap knock off, this is it's own movie, and it's interesting to compare the two. If I was going to pick, I'd say the earlier one is the more complete film, making it better in my eyes.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1095217/

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Ghost Rider (2007)

One of the films I'd forgotten about when I first decided to do this look at bad comic book movies was Ghost Rider, starring Nicolas Cage. I remember watching At the Movies with Richard Roeper and whatever co-host he had on at the time saying that this was just one in a line of recent Cage films that weren't screened for reviewers. That struck me as odd, as it did them, because usually the films that avoid screening are the obvious stinkers like White Chicks, so for Cage's people to do that with a big budget movie based on a popular comic book that co-starred some big names, was a little suspicious.

Ghost Rider has Cage as Johnny Blaze, a young man who makes a deal with Mephisto, played by Peter Fonda, to save his dad from cancer, only to have the Devil kill said father in an accident during their bike show. Anyway, however many years later, and Cage is a famous stunt rider, trying to put the deal he made with Fonda out of his mind. Then Blackheart, played by Wes Bentley, shows up, and Fonda knows the only way he can stop his evil son is by calling in his deal with Cage, making Cage become the Ghost Rider.



This is yet another one that could've been so good, and so wasn't. There was this sense at the beginning that they'd go with this small scale, Southwestern-style, noir-ish, supernatural legend type deal, something like "Devil Went Down to Georgia", or U-Turn. Then they hit us with the bad clichés. Oh no, Cage makes a date with his old sweetheart Eva Mendes, what's gonna happen? No Cage, don't stand her up and leave her sitting alone at the restaurant while you turn into Ghost Rider! It was hard to watch. And then every time Ghost Rider drove around, he caused tens of thousands of dollars in damage. It felt like a bad light beer commercial, where absurd doughy guys break things just to get their hands on a bottle of some. It's been a long time since I've read Ghost Rider comics, but I don't remember him turning the area around him into a disaster just by driving through. I would say, based on those issues, the critics probably would've killed it, but some, like me, might have extolled it's virtues as well, so it really should've been screened, and not screening it just tells me that the people making it really did want to amp up the mindless action aspects, and rub out the cooler Southwestern style legend aspects.

The thing is, Cage was really good. Okay, the Texas accent was bad, but everything else was good. I also think he would've preferred taking the big budget action aspect out and making it the Southwestern style urban legend. He lent a sense of quirkiness to the role the way he did with his assassin in Bangkok Dangerous, a sort of off-beat tone in the way he delivered his lines and reacted to the actors and situations around him that was different from every other comic book movie, even Robert Downey jr. in Iron Man. I read somewhere that he's really into comics, seeing them as our mythology, but Ben Affleck was really into comics too, and he didn't do anywhere near as well with Daredevil as Cage did with Ghost Rider. It's funny, because for all the times I kill Cage on here for his National Treasures and The Family Mans, the two films I've reviewed so far I both liked.



I always liked Ghost Rider like I liked Daredevil, but for some reason, I guess the way it was marketed and with it having Nicolas Cage, I wasn't anywhere near as excited to see this as I was that. One thing I think though is Daredevil, like Ghost Rider, lends itself less to the big budget actioner approach than say a Spiderman or Iron Man. I'm not saying they don't need hi-tech special effects and green screens and whatnot to make them work, but their stories work better on a smaller scale. Less is more, I guess I'm saying. The effect of the Southwest, the carnival, the Peter Fonda as the Devil, or Sam Elliott as the former Texas Ranger, are all betrayed by the excessive destruction just because it's blockbustery, and all the cinematic clichés. I listened to some of the director's commentary, and he made some comment about how he wanted to add elements of the Southwest in it. Don't add elements, just go for it. And then he described the use of the cinematic cliché of Eve Mendes being stood up in this way to suggest it was something he wanted to incorporate without curbing the momentum of the movie. Dude, by making us suffer through such overworn territory, you killed any momentum you had for the rest of the film regardless.

One thing we discussed in our look at Hulk was how Jennifer Connelly might have been the hottest female lead in a comic book movie, but I'd have to say Eva Mendes is very close. Of course she's hot in a very different way. It's interesting too to see how the Hulk and Ghost Rider are very similar as super heroes, in how their alter egos change into them in a Jekyll and Hyde sort of way. What made Ghost Rider, and Eva Mendes in her role as the leading lady, better than Hulk and what Connelly had to work with, was how drab the latter's material was. Mendes and Cage seemed to have more fun with things, and it made for a better film, and probably made Mendes even hotter on the whole. On top of Mendes being hot, the girl that played the young Mendes, Raquel Alessi, was really hot as well. According to imdb, she was in the horror classic Uncle Sam. She would've been in her early teens at the time, which is probably why I don't remember her.



Finally, this film employed a great supporting cast. First, Peter Fonda as Mephisto was great. I think he would've been better in a scaled down version of the movie-- this big budget thing would've worked more with a big haired Mephisto-- but he was still great. Wes Bentley as Blackheart was also cool. Again, he would've fit even better in an indie style Southwestern deal. Same can be said about Sam Elliott as the older Ghost Rider. Unlike in Hulk, where he was annoying, here he fit. Yes, everything that came out of his mouth still sounded like "Beef: it's what's for dinner" to me, but I liked it more with a cowboy hat. Finally, Donal Logue played Cage's buddy. He's usually much better doing commentary on VH-1 for their I Love the 70s series, but with Cage the two had great chemistry and he was funny in spots.

In the final analysis, this movie was killed by the need to make it a big budget Hollywood actioner. There's quality material in there worth mining, and it was pushed aside for superfluous special effects and well-worn cinematic blah. That's too bad, because the cast was good, and the film's many bright spots were overshadowed by the need to make this as much like its other big budget brethren, and in the end, none of it worked. I am curious to see if Ghost Rider 2 is better, though. Tweak it, don't reboot it. More U-Turn, less Spiderman 3.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0259324/

Bangkok Dangerous (2008)

As we continue in our series of exploring box office bombs, our next film is Bangkok Dangerous. It's probably no secret that I've been waiting to get my hands on a Nicolas Cage film. It's nothing personal against him, I just feel like his movies, like National Treasure or The Family Man, can be so soul sucking, yet so many people come to me and say "did you see National Treasure? It was so good!", and I die a little bit inside.

Bangkok Dangerous is a bigger budget, Hollywood produced, Nicolas Cage starring version of a movie made by Hong Kong directors the Pang Brothers. It follows the exploits of Cage, an assassin, sent to Bangkok to do four jobs. While there, though, he starts to lose his hard edge, falls in love with a deaf woman who works at a nearby pharmacy, and decides to train the kid who's been working for him as his messenger. As we all know, though, a hit man who loses his edge is not long for this world, and Cage has to make peace with the deeds he's done and try to make amends before it's all over.



I really wasn't expecting this, but for the second week in a row, I actually like the box office bomb. Now, don't get me wrong, there was plenty that didn't work: Cage's voice-over narration, Cage as a cold-blooded assassin, and Cage with that haircut. But I can't fault Cage for going out of his element and trying this picture, or for putting his name behind a project intended to get the word out about two up-and-coming directors from Hong Kong. The story was slightly flawed, in that I couldn't reconcile the cold-blooded assassin with the human being awkwardly taking a deaf woman out on a date, or teaching his messenger how to be an assassin too; and maybe that was the point, but it just didn't work organically for me. That being said, the action was very stylized, and Bangkok as a setting was perfect for a movie like that. It had a modern Old West feel to it.

When the movie began, and Cage was doing his silly voice-overs, I thought "oh, I'm going to enjoy this. It'll be like taking candy from a baby." Throw in the hairdo, and over-the-top cold-blooded assassin routine, and this looked like a slam dunk. But then there's the scene where Cage goes to the pharmacy to care for a wound on his shoulder. Suddenly, there was the guy we loved in Moonstruck, the guy we wanted to see in Wild at Heart, the guy that won an Oscar in Leaving Lost Vegas. Out of all the films to allow him to use his range, it was Bangkok Dangerous. The problem was, perhaps he was too good in the scenes with the deaf woman. Maybe he needed to infuse some of that awkwardness into his role as the cold blooded hit man. What we forget is, he has the chops to pull off John Cusack's character in Gross Pointe Blank.



But we forget that because he's let us forget that. Next, Knowing, Ghost Rider, National Treasures 1 and 2, The Family Man, The Weather Man, The Wicker Man... should I continue? When I watched the making of featurette, and he discussed wanting to go outside his element and do something he doesn't normally do, with directors he doesn't normally work with, in a country he's never been to, and in a genre he's never worked in (unless you count Face/Off, but I don't), I can see why he needed a break from all that other crap. I really want to see what the new Bad Lieutenant film, directed by Werner Herzog, is like. Bangkok Dangerous had glimpses of what made Cage great, and at the very least, reminded me that I shouldn't completely write him off.

I'm not completely familiar with the world of Hong Kong cinema, nor am I that familiar with the work of the Pang Brothers. Their only other major release in the US was The Messengers, and Bangkok Dangerous was definitely better than that. This movie definitely had elements of John Woo's better work, like Hard Boiled, which Cage said was something that interested him about this project. I also saw a lot of Cage's character based on one of my favorites: Le samourai. Where the French film was better, though, was the main character was better-- more natural. This movie shouldn't have tried to remake the lead in Le samourai, it should've replayed on Cage's strengths as an actor, which we saw in full display in his scenes with the deaf woman. Here's where Bangkok Dangerous ultimately fails for me, because it's not original enough, and where it is original, with Cage, it doesn't make as great a use of that as it should.



I haven't seen the original Bangkok Dangerous, but from what I understood, the main character was deaf, not the woman he meets. I have it in my queue and want to see it, but I wonder if that element would've made it enough of a departure from it's forerunners to make it original for me. How many times have we seen the cold-blooded assassin with his rules and his attention to details? I get that the action is really where I'm supposed to go in this film for the excitement, and I found that part fun, but I could get that out of any movie. I also wonder if the original had the horrible voice-overs. I hope not. They were silly and useless, and actually made for lazy storytelling. Everything the voice-overs told us we would've found out in a much more subtle and interesting way just by watching the movie and having it revealed to us organically.

Wow, we're already at the eighth paragraph. Usually I'm scratching to find things to write about, and here I'm running out of room-- and we're just talking about a Nicolas Cage film! Again, this isn't great, but it's not as bad as it seems at first blush. If you can survive the early Cage voice-overs and whatnot, you'll be treated to some scenes that are real vintage Cage, and remind you of why you liked him in the first place.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0814022/