As promised, our earlier looks at some past exemplars of good quality Cage Rage have lead up to this—a film about Nicolas Cage playing Nicolas Cage caught up in a film about Nicolas Cage films. Confused yet? Well, fortunately, it’s the kind of film where all you need to do is just sit back and enjoy the ride, with the Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
It’s a flick that makes its intent and audience clear within the first few seconds, with a clip from Con Air itself. To get something out of the way—will you be able to fathom this without seeing any prior Cage films? Erm…maybe, but there’s a lot here that’ll seem outright bizarre, if not out of left field. Then again, that is the feeling you get with a fair bit of his filmography, so hey, why not get stuck in with an authentic experience.
But I’m getting ahead of myself—let’s start with the plot. Cage plays a fictionalized version of himself grappling with a Hollywood career and his family problems, between scrambling for script auditions or interrupting his teenage daughter’s birthday with drunken caterwauling. There’s also his apparent hallucinations with his younger self, invoking his look circa Wild at Heart, which do lead to some of the most hilarious moments that I’m sure someone will read far too much into. Past with all the self-deprecation and instances of self-homoeroticising, we’re only just getting started, once Cage ends up with an invite to Spain to a party hosted by rich superfan Javi, played by everyone’s new favorite bounty hunter Pedro Pascal.
Oh, and along the way, Cage ends up getting recruited by the CIA to investigate an arms cartel (Spain is really just Mexico with a little less sombreros, dontchya know). And it only gets more demented from there.
Combining Pascal and Cage is what really makes the film so damn funny—the former is such a manic bundle of fanboyishness that it’s hard not to have fun with every moment he’s on screen, and the best parts are the male bonding between the two. This goes from, as males tend to bond over, geeking about their favorite cheesy action films, to dropping LSD (again, someone redundant with Cage), to, of course, pondering the secrets of how Paddington 2 can—apparently—make you a better person. And yes, there’s a lot of talk about Face/Off, but for those that obsess too much over the exploits of the Cage, there’s plenty more nods through all of this—even a split-second visual reference to Leaving Las Vegas which I greatly appreciated!
The chemistry between our two leads is done well enough that at times it can genuinely feel like they filmed the two simply goofing around on set, or on the backroads of Catalonia, and went from there. That’s why the somewhat weaker parts are around the climax where they get split up—not that there’s no fun to be had, but it feels slightly redundant. Still, by now, after the meta-conversations of selling a non-franchise film in current Hollywood to how even a schlockfest can bond people together, going all out with the action parody is perhaps not an inappropriate way to cap it all off.
You’re best off catching this one as I did—in a theater with others who paid tickets knowing exactly what they were in for, and for that, this one delivers. Cage’s reputation has changed a lot since the nineties, but with this, it’s safe to say he’s embraced it, and as Pascal himself speechifies out about in the flick, it’s still something that can bring joy to folks. As far as comedy-action-metacommentary-self-deprecation films go in recent times…well, there’s not much else like it I can think of, so it’s something worth a look for that alone in my view.
And yes, for those that want it, they do the Wicker Man line. You'll just need to hang in there.
Comments
Post a Comment