Look, Nic Cage has found his schtick, and he’s sticking with it no matter what, okay? I’m not much of a fan of his Cage Rage thing, but at least it usually makes a sort of B-movie sense within the context of whatever gleefully grindhouse flick he’s deploying it in. I’m not sure it tracks thematically with what is going on in Sympathy for the Devil, though.
Because yes, Cage’s unnamed character is definitely a very bad man, and by film’s end, we are definitely intended to feel some sympathy for him. Yet it’s almost impossible to muster up much emotion beyond boredom — a little disgust, maybe, but hardly compassion — after the depraved behavior we witness.
It begins when Cage’s (Renfield, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) The Passenger, as the credits call him, carjacks The Driver (Joel Kinnaman: The Suicide Squad, Child 44) and instructs him to just “drive.” What does The Passenger want with The Driver? Was this a random crime, or did The Passenger target this particular Driver? There’s meant to be some suspense, it appears, in the wannabe cat-and-mouse the two men engage in on the road as these questions are teased, but newcomer Luke Paradise’s rote, familiar script is mostly just, ahem, spinning its wheels, killing time before the obvious and inevitable answers can be broached and dealt with.
To make up for this tedium, perhaps, director Yuval Adler appears to have completely abdicated his duties as, you know, director when faced with the prospect of getting his very own Cage Rage flick under his belt. Cage verges on the cartoonish, wild-eyed and screaming and literally playing with fire, capturing no sense at all of a man pushed beyond his limits, as the script would have it. The Passenger coldly relishes every heinous act he commits here. He’s enjoying it all immensely, which serves only an audience hunger for an unhinged Cage performance, not the needs of this story.
Kinnaman does his best to hold his own against his increasingly off-the-rails costar, but it’s like the two actors are in different movies — indeed, even the two characters might as well be. Which doesn’t help us gather much sympathy for The Driver, either — what little concern Kinnaman is able to generate via his performance early on is squandered by the script and the lackluster direction in ways that are baffling.
Anyway, look, Nic Cage has found his schtick, and he’s sticking with it no matter what, okay?
more films like this:
• Collateral [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
• Pig [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Hulu US | Kanopy US | Curzon Home Cinema UK]
What a shame. I would class myself as a Cage enjoyer (that plus general vampire interest is what got me to see Renfield, which was pretty whatever; the high water mark will always be Raising Arizona), and I think I’d see just about anything with Joel Kinnaman in it. Probably not this one, though!
If you haven’t seen For All Mankind on Apple TV+, do. Kinnaman is the big name in that, and he’s great. (The entirety of the show is great, too.)