A couple of years ago it was reported that Nicolas Cage would play the title role in the rebooting of the Superman franchise. He didn’t get the part, the unknown Brandon Routh became the Man of Steel instead, but he didn’t give up on the idea of playing a superhero. He’s a big time comic book aficionado so he lobbied to star in Ghost Rider, Marvel comic’s story about Johnny Blaze, a daredevil motorcyclist who becomes a bounty hunter for the devil, and won the role from Johnny Depp who was originally slated to play the flame-headed vigilante.
Johnny Blaze is a complicated character. He sold his soul not for the usual reasons—power or wealth—but for the love. His father, and motorcycle mentor, was being consumed by cancer and had only days to live when one day the young Blaze was visited by a man who looked very much like Peter Fonda. The Easy Rider star, playing the Devil, offers Blaze a deal: his soul for a cure to his father’s illness. Of course when you deal with the Devil you don’t always get what you bargain for, as Blaze soon discovers.
The trade dooms him to an empty life, void of love and other worldly pleasures. Worse, when confronted with evil Johnny Blaze turns into the fiery Ghost Rider, a skeletal form covered in fire rather than flesh. That kind of thing can make relationships kind of dodgy, even if your love interest is an old flame that reenters your life years after you abandoned her.
I’d like to say that Cage “lights up the screen” or something witty like that and mean something more than his head is on fire for most of the movie, but there is something quite odd about this performance. He seems to be having fun with the part, but the movie has tone problems and most of them stem from Cage’s quirky performance.
Ghost Rider can’t quite make up its mind whether it wants to be a comedy, a romance or a supernatural action flick. It tries to be all three, but when the main character’s most noticeable trait is a flaming skull for a head it’s hard to take any of it seriously. And maybe we’re not meant to take it seriously, but with a better-realized story Ghost Rider may have caught fire.
If Quentin Tarantino made a kid’s coming-of-age movie it might look something like “Kick-Ass”. It has most of his trademarks—clever dialogue, good soundtrack and some high octane violence—but there’s a twist. The bloodiest, most cut throat purveyor of ultra violence in the film is an eleven year old girl.
Based on a wild indie comic of the same name by Mark Millar “Kick-Ass” tells a couple of intertwining stories. First up is Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), a fanboy who creates a superhero alter ego called Kick-Ass as a way to boost his self esteem. In life he says his only superpower is being invisible to girls, but when he dons the suit he becomes… only marginally more super. His exploits, however, grab the attention of Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (Chloë Moretz), a slightly psychotic father and daughter team of masked (and in Hit Girl’s case, wigged) avengers who admire Ass’s style and moxy. For the caped crusaders in “Kiss-Ass” all roads lead to drug lord Frank D’Amico (a suitably evil Mark Strong) a ruthless tough guy who is unafraid to go all medieval—his men even use a giant microwave as a torture device—on his enemies.
The action scenes are plentiful and frenetic and once you get past the question, “Why would Chloë Moretz’s parents allow her to do this?” they’re really fun. It’s a little unsettling to see a young girl wielding a switchblade, gunning down dozens of bad guys and going hand-to-hand with a full grown man, but for superhero starved audiences—“Iron Man” won’t be out until next month!—Hit Girl could become a guilty pleasure. It’s not right, and the character will likely be controversial, but it is cool. Not since Natalie Portman in “Léon” has the screen seen such a sweet faced assassin.
But Chloë Moretz’s performance isn’t all high flying action. She makes the best of the darkly comic script, playing both sides of the Mindy / Hit Girl character. Out of costume she has a sweet playful side that pretty much evaporates when she puts on the wig and the weapons.
She plays well off Cage, who once again scores with a very loopy performance, but it is her ability to bring some exuberant fun to her scenes that is “Kick-Ass’s” strongest suit.
“Kick-Ass” is an unusual coming of age story in all respects except one, and that is the film’s weakness. The love story between Dave and Katie (Lyndsy Fonseca) is typical teen fare and is soon forgotten when the action kicks in.
Apart from the mushy teen stuff, however, “Kick-Ass” is one movie that lives up to its title.
How do actors become parodies of themselves? Three of the brightest and the best from the 70s crop of method actors, Jack Nicholson, Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino have, in the mind of director Frances Ford Coppola, gotten lazy and played it safe. “They all live off the fat of the land,” he said.
Coppola may want to add another name to the list and a family member at that. In Knowing, a new science fiction thriller, the director’s Academy Award winning nephew Nicolas Cage bottoms out, handing in a ridiculous performance that completes (let’s hope!) his trilogy of Razzie Award worthy work. From The Wicker Man to Bangkok Dangerous and now Knowing, it’s as if Cage is engaging in an experiment with extreme b-movie acting. He’s always ridden the line between the sublime (Wild at Heart) and the ridiculous (Face/Off) but even in his most over-the-top glory the risks he takes have been interesting, if not always successful. Who else would eat a live cockroach on screen?
In recent years though, it’s as if he’s all risk and no judgment. How else do you explain the bear suit in Wicker Man or the absurd wig in Bangkok Dangerous? Knowing marks the third time in as many years that Cage has played a parody of the edgy characters that he used to excel at.
He is John Koestler, an astrophysicist and professor at MIT who, since the untimely death of his wife, has given up his faith and adopted the much darker philosophy of randomness. He now believes that there is no rhyme or reason to the world and sometimes bad things just happen. When his son brings home a 50-year-old letter from a time capsule at his school, John’s faith, or lack thereof, is tested as the mysterious letter seems to accurately predict horrible tragedies. If he doesn’t believe, and doesn’t try to figure out the letter’s strange code many people may die.
The basic idea for Knowing is cool. It’s a supernatural thriller with a surprise sci fi development but Cage seems to be acting in a b-movie while everyone else is trying to make an a-picture. He over acts every scene, tries to sell every one of the script’s silly twists and turns and by the time he utters, “How am I supposed to stop the end of the world?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or hang my head in embarrassment at a career gone so awry.
Like Cage’s excessive performance, Knowing is extreme—extremely loud and extremely overwrought. The volume is cranked both literally and emotionally. The blaring soundtrack almost threatens to drown out the angst everyone in this movie seems to suffer from. A wild subway crash and a large scale sequence involving a plane dropping from the sky add some action eye candy but those expensive effects can’t disguise the fact that this is merely a b-movie trifle with a big budget.
In Lord of War Nicolas Cage stars as Yuri Orlov, a charming guy who rises to the top of his field in the death-dealing world of gunrunning. Defending his profession he notes that his wares kill fewer people than cigarettes and alcohol, and that he’s never sold anything to Osama Bin Laden because “he was always bouncing cheques.” The lighter moments, however, are tempered with scenes that aggressively show that damage guns do. One particularly effective montage follows a bullet from the manufacturing phase straight through to the gun which shoots it at a young man’s head.
The film received middling reviews when it came out theatrically—it gets a 58% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes—but actually plays much better on DVD. Mixing the dark humor of Catch 22—The first and most important rule of gun running is: Never get shot with your own merchandise—with Cage’s anti-hero gives this the feel of an HBO movie of the week. Lord of War is dramatically flawed, but thought provoking and inventive enough to be worth a rental.
Last Holiday: Weirdly paced story about a woman who is diagnosed with a deadly disease and given only three weeks to live. She decides to make the most of the short time she has left and goes to a $4000 a night European hotel to see a side of life that she had only ever dreamed about. Once there she hob knobs with the rich and powerful–including the morally corrupt owner of the department store she used to work for–who think she is a wealthy socialite. The film is meant to be a life affirming fantasy, and on that level it succeeds, but mostly because Queen Latifah is so charming and so watchable on screen. If you took her out of the equation Last Holiday would be more like a vacation from hell.
Set in the years following the Crusades, “Season of the Witch” sees Nicolas Cage go all medieval on the forces of evil and, very possibly, his credibility as an actor.
Cage and Ron “Hellboy” Perlman play AWOL knights who fled the Crusades after being forced to slaughter women and children in the name of God. When they are apprehended and accused of being deserters they save themselves from rotting in a plague ridden dungeon by making a deal to transport a known witch cross country to where she can be tried and hopefully, put an end to the Black Plague. Of course, even though they have the help of a colourful cast of characters — including a priest, a criminal and a God’s warrior wannabe — they have a devil of a time getting her to the sanctuary.
I’ve lost track trying to list the career phases of Nicolas Cage. There was the loose-limbed eccentricity of “Wild at Heart” and “Raising Arizona.” The method acting of “Leaving Las Vegas” and extreme jazz riffing of “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans,” among others but his latest movie seems to indicate a new chapter. It’s no secret that Cage is suffering some financial difficulties these days, but “Season of the Witch,” a pay cheque movie if there ever was one, suggests that he is not only financially bankrupt but artistically as well.
I wasn’t a big fan of his larger-than-life acting in “Bangkok Dangerous” and “Knowing,” but at least he seemed to be putting some effort into his work. Here he’s lifeless and flat, as though simply showing up with hairpiece intact is enough to constitute a performance. I miss the extreme Nicolas Cage, the actor who wasn’t afraid to take chances, not the confounding Cage who buries his talent under a pay cheque.
Cage’s performance is simply the cherry on top of this rancid Sundae. Director Dominic Sena — what’s happened to this guy since he made “Kalifornia”? –does his best Uwe Boll impression behind the camera, junking up the story with bad buddy-cop-dialogue-with-a-1332 AD-twist — “We’re gonna need more holy water!” — and even worse special effects.
It’s too early to call “Season of the Witch” one of the worst movies of the year but it does set the bar awfully high… or low.
“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is a remake of the famous segment in Disney’s “Fantasia” in name only. Sure there are a few lively mops and other cleaning supplies that come to life, echoing Mickey Mouse’s symphonic cartoon, but in the new version there is also wild special effects, Nic Cage’s crazy hair and best of all, Jay Baruchel as the title character.
The story begins in 740 AD, when Merlin is betrayed by one of his three apprentices. A battle between loyal Merlinians Balthazar (Nicolas Cage) and Veronica (Monica Bellucci) and the turncoat Maxim Horvath (Alfred Molina) ends when Veronica is trapped in a magic nesting doll called a Grimhold with Horvath and evil sorceress Morgana (Alice Krige). Cut to the 21st century. Balthazar has searched for one thousand years to find “the Prime Merlinian,” the only person powerful enough to kill Morgana and free Veronica from the Grimhold. The centuries long search ends up at the door of Dave Stutler (Jay Baruchel) a nerdy New York City physics student who sounds a lot like the guy from “How to Train Your Dragon.” In the coming days Dave not only learns about sorcery, but also a thing or two about self confidence, his love interest (played by ScarJo look-a-like Teresa Palmer) and how to defeat the forces of evil.
“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is the second Jerry Bruckheimer movie of the summer season, following “The Prince of Persia.” Like “The Prince of Persia” this movie takes a thin premise and stretches it to feature length, but unlike the ill fated “Prince” “Apprentice” dishes up fun characters to go along with the trademark Bruckheimer action.
Baruchel, Cage and Molina ground the movie with, if not exactly believable characters—I believe Cage as a thousand year old sorcerer, but I don’t believe that hair is actually his!—then characters that can hold their own against the film’s frenetic pace and wild action. Director Jon “National Treasure” Turteltaub keeps the pedal to the metal, plunking in an action sequence about every ten minutes. The action is typical Bruckheimer CGI overdrive but is inventive and mostly family friendly. There are a couple of images that may disturb very young kids, but anyone over the age of ten shouldn’t find anything here they haven’t already seen in videogames.
Cage and Molina bring a larger-than-life feel to their characters. Cage isn’t exactly in his extreme “Bad Lieutenant” form here, but he is clearly having fun; ditto Molina who clearly relishes playing the bad guy.
Those guys eat up the scenery but it is Baruchel who provides the heart of the film. He brings the same charm and way with physical comedy to this mega-budget film as he does to the smaller character based movies he makes like “The Trotsky.” He’s appealing and even when the romance aspect of the story starts to drag Baruchel keeps us on side.
“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is a great air conditioner movie for these thermometer-busting summer days.
It’s not often you find two Oscar winners headlining an almost direct to video movie (it played at TIFF and a week in limited release), but “Trespass” features Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman in a movie so forgettable it’s possible the studio simply forgot to schedule a run in theatres.
The movie takes place almost entirely inside the multimillion-dollar home of Kyle and Sarah Miller (Cage and Kidman). He’s a hotshot real estate agent with a secret; she’s a bored Stepford wife. The suburban ennui of their lives is shattered by a home invasion. When Kyle tries to negotiate with the baddies the situation escalates until the lives of everyone are at stake.
As a tribute to the thrillers of the 1980s “Trespass” is on the right track, except for the complete lack of thrills. Told without an ounce of urgency, the story begs for some twists and turns, but they don’t come. No twists, no turns, not even a slight veering off course. The movie unfolds in such predictable ways not even Nicolas Cage’s usual histrionics can breathe life into this zombified script.
First of all, he’s badly miscast. The ideal part for him would have been the lead villain, but it’s not the movie star role. His face would have been hidden for much of the movie and he’s far from the hero of the piece, but at least he’s halfway interesting. Cage’s take on Kyle Is so by the book you cold bet paper cuts simply by watching him go through the motions.
As for Nicole… it’s time to bring back the fake nose and once again do movies worthy of her talent.
Having said all this, I doubt “Trespass” will hurt the careers of anyone involved because in a couple of months no one will remember this movie ever existed.
The forecast for The Weather Man is not good. Stormy skies lie ahead for Nicolas Cage who plays David Spritz, a television weatherman in Chicago who is up for a gig on a national morning show based in New York. His career is progressing well enough, but his personal life is a wreck. He has an ex-wife, two kids who don’t like him and a disapproving father who rains on his parade every chance he gets.
The problem with The Weather Man is tone. Billed as both a comedy and a drama—a dramedy if you will—it is neither. Clumsy writing blunts funny moments and the drama doesn’t work because we don’t really care about these characters. Cage plays Spritz as a self-absorbed schmuck who comes to realize that his existence is meaningless. I agree with him.
Oliver Stone’s films often express alternative theories of reality. In JFK he explored the vast conspiracy theory that has sprung up around the assassination of John Kennedy. His takes on Alexander the Great, Jim Morrison and Richard Nixon were all as contentious as the subjects were diverse. Stone almost never plays it safe but in World Trade Center he has put aside the provocative material he is best known for and made his most straightforward film in years. Focusing on the plight of two 9/11 first responders and their families Stone has made a film about a difficult subject that offers hope instead of controversy.
The power of the best Stone films is very much on display here—unforgettable images include the shadow of the plane that crashed into the first tower and the resulting twisted wreckage of the building—without the self-indulgent tendencies that mar his less interesting work.
Stone hones the story down to two men, Sergeant John McLoughlin and Will Jimeno, two Port Authority workers who were trapped under tons of rubble when the second World Trade Center tower collapsed on them as they prepared to evacuate people from the devastation. He focuses on their struggle to stay alive and their hope that they will be rescued. Above ground Stone cuts to the families of McLoughlin and Jimeno and their search to uncover information about their loved ones.
It’s a very effective way of dramatizing the events of 9/11. By narrowing the scope of the story down to two families the viewer gets an up-close and personal look at the tragedy of the day. From afar the story is too large, the kind of evil that caused the destruction too hard to understand but we can understand the tears of a wife who doesn’t know if she is a widow or not or a long hug between two people wracked by grief. Stone handles these moments gently.
Not so gentle is the actual event itself—the felling of the towers. Stone puts us inside a collapsing building and it is harrowing. The mournful wailing of the twisting metal, the giant chunks of cement and the black billowing smoke make it seem like hell on earth. We all saw it on television on the day, now Stone has placed us inside the building and it is harrowing.
The two men trapped men are helpless and must survive on the hope that the ray of light they can see far above them is a lifeline. Otherwise all is lost. Despite acting with only their faces—the rest of their bodies are trapped under rubble for most of the film—Nicolas Cage and Michael Pena hand in multi-layered performances. As they talk to one another, keeping one another company in their underground hell, we learn what makes them tick. What could have been tedious, claustrophobic scenes of the two men pinned by giant slabs of rock become strangely uplifting as they talk about their families and their lives in a desperate attempt to stay alive. Stone, through his actors chooses to celebrate the human spirit and the ties that bind, not the ideology of separation. By excluding any mention of al-Queda Stone shows that his movie has no political agenda. It is simply a movie about people rising above a dreadful situation.
World Trade Center isn’t the final word on 9/11. As the defining event of a generation filmmakers will revisit this story many times, many different ways, and while the film reveals little about the event it portrays, it speaks volumes about the people it affected.
