Mate, I better get off the blower. The cabby’s about to throw a wobbly.

Stolen

(2012)

In which Nicolas Cage’s latest wig is unleashed on New Orleans. His syrup is certainly put through its paces this time, as our Nic has to do quite a lot of pegging it hither and thither. His daughter’s been stolen, you see, and he wants her back. Stolen by an ex-partner in crime (revealing that his ex-partner is not dead is not really a spoiler, as this fact is only a secret for about two minutes of screen time) with whom Nic stole $10m, and which Nic promptly caused to vanish (nothing as sleight of hand as Now You See Me, which is a small mercy), so leaving ex-partner a tad disgruntled. Thus, the title is highly descriptive and appropriate. It also sits comfortably with other succinctly named recent Cage (pretty much) straight-to-DVD fare like Trespass and Justice (the latter also set in Cage’s favourite city). Neither of those were particularly smart thrillers, but sat next to Stolen they take on hitherto unrecognised qualities. This is a particularly dumb movie, and it doesn’t even have the benefit of a crazy Cage performance to see it through. Lots of running, though, so requiring a firmly glued rug.

The first 20 minutes are reasonable, setting the scene for the main event. A bank robbery goes wrong thanks to the dogged pursuit of Danny Huston’s FBI guy, and Cage’s Will Montgomery is banged up for the next eight years. The rest of the gang escape justice (including the sweetly pretty Malin Akermen and Lost’s not-at-all becoming M.C. Gainey), but Will is compelled to put a bullet in unhinged cohort Vincent’s leg. Vincent (Josh Lucas) has been Will’s accomplice for years, but it’s only now that it becomes obvious he’s a complete psycho? So Will has both the police and (the apparently dead) Vincent on his trail when he is released, after the disappearing loot.

David Guggenheim, writer of Safe House (which moved fast enough not to notice the script problems, I guess) wrote this sub-Ransom crap, which doesn’t have an ounce of logic or coherence. The sign of a good robbery/heist movie is how intricate, well conceived and staged the big steals are (take Heat, for example). Guggenheim has lifted a couple of ideas, but seemingly couldn’t be bothered to think them through. So there’s the old “it looks like the Feds are going to bust in on our protagonists but actually they’ve the wrong building” visual gag, but the geography and staging are so muddled it fails to carry as a “clever” twist. Likewise, Montgomery stealing a store of gold is… well, I see no reason to spoil it but it’s utterly absurd.

If director Simon West had approached Stolen with the tongue-in-cheek excess that washed over his previous collaboration with Cage, Con Air, this might just have worked. But truth be told, West did his level best to murder a witty script in that case and little he has done since show’s any indication of mastery of his chosen field. He’s perhaps a more coherent action director now, but it’s telling that he has found his niche directing B-movies with the Stat (The Mechanic remake might actually be the best thing he’s done in a decade, although that’s not saying much). I’m frankly stunned that, following his next Stat vehicle (a remake of an ‘80s William Goldman script that starred Burt Reynolds) he is making Tolkien & Lewis. This sounds tantamount to Roland Emmerich directing Anonymous (although that picture is actually quite good fun). Will the two authors have bare-chested fisticuffs in a forest at some point? Or try to stab each other in the eyes with fountain pens?

Race-against-time scripts often at least have the benefit of creating a natural inner tension, but West’s picture picks up only very sporadically. The occasional encounter with the cops dogging Will’s heels, a break-in at the FBI, Nic pulling some of his special fight moves. But it’s a movie that quickly becomes about diversion. Vincent kidnaps estranged daughter Alison (Sami Gayle), but the only thing on my mind was how Nic buying a plush Care Bear was a conscious nod-wink to Con Air’s bunny in the box (likewise, Cage gets in a de rigueur reference to his music tastes).

Mainly, though, it becomes about Lucas’ deranged performance. Somewhere along the road he lost any chance of making it as a leading man, probably around the time of Hulk. It’s that inherent shiftiness, most likely. It must chafe a bit that similarly cold-eyed killer type Jason Clarke is getting starring roles. Lucas knows that the only way to approach his one-legged, crazy-brained nutjob is to go bigger and bigger with each scene. And he is quite entertaining; God knows, the picture needs distractions. So when he kicks the living shit out of annoying Aussie tourist we’re almost on side with him. The climax, at a disused fairground, is the stuff of ‘80s Dolph Lundgren movies, as a waterlogged Lucas and Cage duke it out and the former, having been set alight and hit by a car, resorts to his best Creature from the Black Lagoon impression. Grarrr!

It’s all alright, however. Inevitably, this peril teaches Will’s daughter how much daddy means to her (shouldn’t it be the other way round, reconfirming what a monumental ass he is?) and sad-eyed Nic gets to play one last jape on the not-so-bad-really FBI guys. Lucas and an aggressively cheesy Mark Isham score aside, there isn’t enough to make this a so-bad-it’s-good latter-day Cage & the Tax Man effort; Trespass is much more fun in that regard. The poster is absolutely appalling too (below). This is the thing; I’m a (increasingly rare) fan of Cage’s but if he’s going to appear in consistent rubbish in order to pay the bills he could at least give us the satisfaction of deranged performances to make up for it. When he first started with his action hero reinvention he brought the same spark to them as he did his “serious” roles. Lately the only distinguishing feature of his performances has been his postiche rental.

That was worth five minutes in photoshop, now wasn't it?

Comments

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

Haven’t you ever heard of the healing power of laughter?

Batman (1989)
(SPOILERS) There’s Jaws, there’s Star Wars, and then there’s Batman in terms of defining the modern blockbuster. Jaws’ success was so profound, it changed the way movies were made and marketed. Batman’s marketing was so profound, it changed the way tentpoles would be perceived: as cash cows. Disney tried to reproduce the effect the following year with Dick Tracy, to markedly less enthusiastic response. None of this places Batman in the company of Jaws as a classic movie sold well, far from it. It just so happened to hit the spot. As Tim Burton put it, it was “more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie”. It’s difficult to disagree with his verdict that the finished product (for that is what it is) is “mainly boring”.

Now, of course, the Burton bat has been usurped by the Nolan incarnation (and soon the Snyder). They have some things in common. Both take the character seriously and favour a sombre tone, which was much more of shock to the system when Burton did it (even…

I'm reliable, I'm a very good listener, and I'm extremely funny.

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)
(SPOILERS) When I wrote my 23 to see in 2019, I speculated that James Cameron might be purposefully giving his hand-me-downs to lesser talents because he hubristically didn’t want anyone making a movie that was within a spit of the proficiency we’ve come to expect from him. Certainly, Robert Rodriguez and Tim Miller are leagues beneath Kathryn Bigelow, Jimbo’s former spouse and director of his Strange Days screenplay. Miller’s no slouch when it comes to action – which is what these movies are all about, let’s face it – but neither is he a craftsman, so all those reviews attesting that Terminator: Dark Fate is the best in the franchise since Terminator 2: Judgment Day may be right, but there’s a considerable gulf between the first sequel (which I’m not that big a fan of) and this retcon sequel to that sequel.

So you want me to be half-monk, half-hitman.

Casino Royale (2006)
(SPOILERS) Despite the doubts and trepidation from devotees (too blonde, uncouth etc.) that greeted Daniel Craig’s casting as Bond, and the highly cynical and low-inspiration route taken by Eon in looking to Jason Bourne's example to reboot a series that had reached a nadir with Die Another Day, Casino Royale ends up getting an enormous amount right. If anything, its failure is that it doesn’t push far enough, so successful is it in disarming itself of the overblown set pieces and perfunctory plotting that characterise the series (even at its best), elements that would resurge with unabated gusto in subsequent Craig excursions.

For the majority of its first two hours, Casino Royale is top-flight entertainment, with returning director Martin Campbell managing to exceed his excellent work reformatting Bond for the ‘90s. That the weakest sequence (still good, mind) prior to the finale is a traditional “big” (but not too big) action set piece involving an attempt to…

The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.

Repo Man (1984)
In fairness, I should probably check out more Alex Cox’s later works. Before I consign him to the status of one who never made good on the potential of his early success. But the bits and pieces I’ve seen don’t hold much sway. I pretty much gave up on him after Walker. It seemed as if the accessibility of Repo Man was a happy accident, and he was subsequently content to drift further and further down his own post-modern punk rabbit hole, as if affronted by the “THE MOST ASTONISHING FEATURE FILM DEBUT SINCE STEVEN SPIELBERG’S DUEL” accolade splashed over the movie’s posters (I know, I have a copy; see below).

This popularity of yours. Is there a trick to it?

The Two Popes (2019)
(SPOILERS) Ricky Gervais’ Golden Globes joke, in which he dropped The Two Popes onto a list of the year’s films about paedophiles, rather preceded the picture’s Oscar prospects (three nominations), but also rather encapsulated the conversation currently synonymous with the forever tainted Roman Catholic church; it’s the first thing anyone thinks of. And let’s face it, Jonathan Pryce’s unamused response to the gag could have been similarly reserved for the fate of his respected but neglected film. More people will have heard Ricky’s joke than will surely ever see the movie. Which, aside from a couple of solid lead performances, probably isn’t such an omission.

You guys sure like watermelon.

The Irishman aka I Heard You Paint Houses (2019)
(SPOILERS) Perhaps, if Martin Scorsese hadn’t been so opposed to the idea of Marvel movies constituting cinema, The Irishman would have been a better film. It’s a decent film, assuredly. A respectable film, definitely. But it’s very far from being classic. And a significant part of that is down to the usually assured director fumbling the execution. Or rather, the realisation. I don’t know what kind of crazy pills the ranks of revered critics have been taking so as to recite as one the mantra that you quickly get used to the de-aging effects so intrinsic to its telling – as Empire magazine put it, “you soon… fuggadaboutit” – but you don’t. There was no point during The Irishman that I was other than entirely, regrettably conscious that a 75-year-old man was playing the title character. Except when he was playing a 75-year-old man.

Look, the last time I was told the Germans had gone, it didn't end well.

1917 (2019)
(SPOILERS) When I first heard the premise of Sam Mendes’ Oscar-bait World War I movie – co-produced by Amblin Partners, as Spielberg just loves his sentimental war carnage – my first response was that it sounded highly contrived, and that I’d like to know how, precisely, the story Mendes’ granddad told him would bear any relation to the events he’d be depicting. And just why he felt it would be appropriate to honour his relative’s memory via a one-shot gimmick. None of that has gone away on seeing the film. It’s a technical marvel, and Roger Deakins’ cinematography is, as you’d expect, superlative, but that mastery rather underlines that 1917 is all technique, that when it’s over and you get a chance to draw your breath, the experience feels a little hollow, a little cynical and highly calculated, and leaves you wondering what, if anything, Mendes was really trying to achieve, beyond an edge-of-the-seat (near enough) first-person actioner.

This is one act in a vast cosmic drama. That’s all.

Audrey Rose (1977)
(SPOILERS) Robert Wise was no stranger to high-minded horror fare when he came to Audrey Rose. He was no stranger to adding a distinctly classy flavour to any genre he tackled, in fact, particularly in the tricky terrain of the musical (West Side Story, The Sound of Music) and science fiction (The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Andromeda Strain). He hadn’t had much luck since the latter, however, with neither Two People nor The Hindenburg garnering good notices or box office. In addition to which, Audrey Rose saw him returning to a genre that had been fundamentally impacted by The Exorcist four years before. One might have expected the realist principals he observed with The Andromeda Strain to be applied to this tale of reincarnation, and to an extent they are, certainly in terms of the performances of the adults, but Wise can never quite get past a hacky screenplay that wants to impart all the educational content of a serious study of continued existence in tandem w…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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