I like Nicolas Cage.
Or at least I used to.
Or at least I do sometimes.
Do I?
Actually, I don’t know whether I do like him. It’s so confusing. Sometimes he is incredibly interesting to watch, giving rich and intense performances in deserving and gripping movies (increasingly rarely), and other times (increasingly often) he slums it in vapid and soulless crapfests where he spends the whole time acting like he’s spent the previous evening being punched in the head and is only interested in helping the terrible asshead powers that be force more of their soft salty bollocks into our eye sockets whilst they ransack our pockets, thus replacing our eyeballs with their foul genital rubbish and leaving us blind to the crap they’re all peddling. Cage seems to pick his projects with an increasingly reckless random abandon, as if he really and genuinely doesn’t care, and for every good movie he has made there are whole toilet-filling avalanches of vile faecal slurry and total tiresome brain dead sputum that you cannot believe he has actually decided would be interesting films for him to make.
BRILLIANTLY INTENSE HIGH POINT
Of course, his high point was back in the mid 1990s when he played the alcoholic ex-movie executive Ben in Mike Figgis’ excellent Leaving Las Vegas (9.8/10), which is probably my favourite movie of all time. That was a sensitively played and brilliantly intense performance that gave us a character that inspired great sympathy and identification at the same time as alienating us with his callous behaviour and self destructive alcoholism. This was a complex and multi-faceted performance that justly met with plaudits and acclaim, and positioned Cage in my young mind as a genius actor from whom we could all expect great things.
EXPLODING EXPLOSIONS AND STYLE OVER SUBSTANCE
Imagine my surprise (and mild horror) as he followed that up with not one but two exploding, car flying, airplane skiing Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay movies where he ran around spouting utter claptrap and shooting assholes like his life depended on it, all lovingly captured in Bay’s signature style over substance, glossy, ass-clenchingly dull fashion. Not that The Rock (5/10) and Con Air (5/10) were godawfully bad necessarily. They weren’t. They were OK, fine within their field, and mostly inoffensive explosion movies that were basically positioned as gun-fetishising adverts for the American Dream (of blowing shit up and being awesome at the same time), although because of the near-constant use of slow motion as things exploded both movies boasted an absurd running time. The Rock, particularly, was notable for a rare appearance by Michael Biehn and for Sean Connery acting like someone’s drunken uncle at a cocaine enema party. So I didn’t hate or resent these movies (you may be surprised to hear), but I was surprised and frankly a little disappointed to find that Cage wasn’t going to follow up his brilliance in Leaving Las Vegas with something equally worthy.
INCREASINGLY POINTLESS WET TURD SPREAD
And since then that seems to have been all Cage has to offer us. Since then he has mostly given us a mass of wet turd spread thinly across an increasingly pointless brace of films whose only purpose seems to be to defeat the reputation he once enjoyed as a serious and credible actor. We can look back through his career and pick out the odd relative gem, Raising Arizona (7.5/10), It Could Happen To You (7.2/10), Adaptation (8/10), Bringing Out The Dead (7.8/10) or Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call- New Orleans (which I STILL haven’t seen, but have on good authority that it’s worth watching), but there are far more films that are total wastes of time and all the most frustrating because we have seen just how good Cage can be when he sets his mind to it. Even City of Angels (5.3/10) and the directionless vagaries of Snake Eyes (5.5/10) now seem like relative high points amongst the dross.
The world really hasn’t needed to sit through unimaginably flaccid twat-fodder like Gone In Sixty Seconds (2/10), Face/Off (3.7/10), Knowing (-/10), Ghost Rider (1.5/10), the nonsensical and unnecessary remake of The Wicker Man (4/10), and his frankly sense-confounding appearances in G-Force, Kick Ass (see my earlier post: https://pablumbiolab.wordpress.com/2010/04/06/kickass/), Astro Boy, and the National Treasure movies, just to list a few examples. I’m at a total loss to explain what is going on in the man’s head. Perhaps his agent runs the show and is quite happy to splatter this sort of pointless excrement all over the now faded memory of the pinnacle of his charge’s career in the hope that he can wring some extra cash from the pockets of those too baffled to resist whatever is playing when they arrive at the idioplex and are all too happy to hand over their money for two hours of cinematic vaccuum. Who knows? If you do, then tell me! Genuinely, I want to know.
And, as I’m sure you know, Cage’s latest movie is the kiddie razzle dazzle doo doo CG magic fest The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and I’m sure beyond a shadow of a doubt his talents will be put to good use amongst the idiot pixels and thoughtfully penned dialogue.
Genuinely Perplexed Regards
Biolab (Concerned)
Pablum from the (bio)Lablum 