If a movie is bad, but still entertains you, was it actually bad?This is the question thatNicolas Cageseems to have devoted his professional life to answering. In a career spanning four decades, with over 100 performances under his belt (including the upcomingThe Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,in which he stars — possibly in his most Nic Cage move yet — as a fictionalized version of Nic Cage), it’s never gotten any easier to pinpoint exactly what he is. The best thing in a bad movie? The dumbest thing in a good movie? Cage utterly defies categorization; there simply are no straight answers.
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The good news is, there don’t have to be. Cage’s blisteringly unique acting style makes a mockery of the binary spectrum of “good’ and ‘bad” altogether. Drawing on all kinds of obscure influences, from German Expressionism to the silent movies of the 1920s, Cage’s weird, wonderful acting style leaves nothing off the table.
Castor Troy/Sean Archer — ‘Face/Off’ (1997)
Super-terrorist Castor Troy attempts to murder FBI agent Sean Archer (John Travolta), but accidentally shoots Sean’s son instead. Six years later, Sean captures Castor, then surgically removes his face and attaches it to his own as part of a covert intelligence-gathering mission. Castor retaliates by stitching Sean’s face tohisand sets out to create chaos.
Why didn’t they just kill Castor after they’d taken his face off? I’ve yet to hear a better answer than “because otherwise there’d be no film,” but I’m satisfied with that, because what a film it is. One of the most common criticisms of Cage is that he over-acts; if that’s the case, I can’t imagine a better person to play Castor/Sean, because if you’re able to’t lose your cool after waking up with the face of the person you hate most in the world, when can you?
What’s amusing aboutFace/Off(other than, you know, the entire premise) is that Cage’s co-star, John Travolta, does a very good Nic Cage impression. Nic Cage just does more Nic Cage. That’s double the Cage — the perfect amount of Cage action for a movie as silly as this.
H.I. “Hi” McDunnough — ‘Raising Arizona’ (1987)
When hapless career criminal H.I. “Hi” McDunnough gets married to a police officer, he vows to put his old life behind him. That is until his wife urges him to kidnap the newborn baby of a local entrepreneur after finding themselves unable to have children themselves. Things go from bad to worse as some of Hi’s old cellmates escape from prison and ask for sanctuary in his home; that, and he seems to be getting hunted down by a mysterious biker with strange demonic powers.
Hi is a larger-than-life caricature, and it’s nigh-on impossible to relate to anything going on inside his brain. We can only sit back enthralled as he nonchalantly blunders his way through unsuccessful hold-ups, ineffective prison sentences, and extremely ill-judged parole hearings. It’s a testament to Cage’s acting style that Hi remains entirely likable despite existing quite beyond any conventional understandings of morality whatsoever.
Edward Malus — ‘The Wicker Man’ (2006)
In this Hollywood remake of the 1973 British classic, Nic Cage stars as dorky traffic cop Edward Malus, who receives a letter from an ex-girlfriend begging him to come to a secluded island off the coast of Washington and help her find her missing daughter. Edward discovers the island is home to sinister neo-pagans who continually impede his investigation, so he elects to run around shouting and punching people until the true nature of their dark conspiracy is made horrifyingly clear.
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The Wicker Manis, famously, awful. But that’s not to say Cage’s performance is. Indeed, it’s one of the only things that make it worth watching. The fundamental issue at the heart of this movie is that tension is supposed to arise from the clash between the island cultists’ creepy attitudes and Edward’s relative normality. Unfortunately, we don’t get normality; we get Nicolas Cage. Cage spends the first portion of the movie brushing off the incredible hostility from the islanders, who despise him, with shockingly underserved goofy confidence. Soon thereafter he switches to a tactic of swearing, threatening, and physically assaulting his way through a well-organized community that is completely evil. Edward’s actions are therefore about as incomprehensible as his antagonists’, and the result is the mesmerizing performance of a man who is simply too dumb to know when he’s beaten.
Roy Waller — ‘Matchstick Men’ (2003)
Matchstick Mensees Nicolas Cage as Roy, a con artist who suffers from numerous neuroses, compulsions, and phobias; he doesn’t like germs, and he doesn’t like being outside. That doesn’t stop him and his partner Frank from making a living off exploiting people, but the surprise appearance of Roy’s hitherto-unknown teenage daughter prompts him to re-evaluate his lifestyle.
In this role, Cage’s fondness for a wildly over-the-top performance provokes a few questions. Is Roy a mockery of a complex and difficult series of mental disorders? Or is Cage’s uninhibited depiction of a deeply troubled manelevatedby his fearless approach to the craft? Whatever the answer, you’re able to’t give Cage’s attempts to walk the tricky tightrope between sincere and eccentric anything less than an A for effort.
Mom and Dadis a pitch-black comedy horror movie where parents all over America are overcome with the irresistible urge to murder their children. Nicolas Cage plays one such parent — the patriarch of the Ryan family — and the movie follows the attempts of his two children as they dodgehisattempts to bludgeon their skulls with a pickaxe.
Cage is great at evoking humor and misery simultaneously, but there are scenes inMom and Dadthat push this contradiction to its limits. Frothing at the mouth like a feral hound, Brent is the perfect embodiment of sterile suburban frustration. You’ll believe this guy wants his kids dead. Although it’s up to you whether you laugh or not.
Meet Terence McDonagh. He’s a walking cocktail of Vicodin, cannabis, cocaine, heroin, and God knows what else. He also happens to be a police lieutenant leading an investigation into a quintuple homicide, presumed to be committed by local drug kingpin Big Fate. And as you might imagine, he isn’t very good at it at all.
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For all of 5 minutes at the start of the film,McDonagh seems like the sympathetic kind of jerk who only acts brutishly because of the callousness that surrounds him, but the film goes gleefully out of its way to shatter any illusions he’s much more than an opportunistic monster. Cage plays McDonagh in a peculiar limbo between comedy and tragedy, and his motivations — if, indeed, hehasconsistent ones — are shrouded beneath the bedraggled, irresponsible bundle of contradictions that he heaves around with him from one hedonistic catastrophe to the next. Cringe, weep, and laugh (likely all at once) as you marvel at Cage’s ineffable portrayal as the pitch-perfect marriage between a sadistic genius and a lobotomy patient.
Eddie — ‘Deadfall’ (1993)
After accidentally killing his con-man father, Joe (Michael Biehn) agrees to carry out his dying wish; to recover goods once stolen from his father by his uncle. Joe embarks on this intrepid mission and finds his uncle — also a con-man. His uncle, Lou (James Coburn), wants him to help out in a series of scams, with the unstable Eddie (Cage) as his partner.
There’s no other way to put this: Cage’s portrayal of Eddie is a masterpiece. A masterpiece of what, exactly, is up for debate, but it’s undeniably themagnum opus ofsomething, even if that something is “unspeakable garbage.” Cage’s flamboyant disregard for the very basics of filmmaking is beyond compare. The man is pure id; a whooping, hollering, dramaturgical nightmare, treating us to, among other things, the most operatic delivery of the word “f**k” in cinematic history. Give it a watch. You know you want to.
Peter Loew — ‘Vampire’s Kiss’ (1988)
Peter Loew might be turning into a vampire. Or he might not. It’s all quite hard to tell, not least because he’s being played by Nicolas Cage. InVampire’s Kiss,we’re treated to one of Cage’s earliest and out-of-control performances as a salacious literary agent who receives (or certainlythinkshe receives) nightly visits from a lustful vampire whose hypnotic hold on him leads him to commit more and more depraved acts in his daily life.
It would be easy to write off Peter as your standard Nic-Cage-goes-goggle-eyed-and-shouts-like-a-maniac routine. But his derangement is essential to the film’s uniquely unsettling tone.Vampire’s Kissis a whirlpool of weirdness with Cage at the center, and his unhinged yet unsympathetic behavior gives the viewer nothing relatable to cling onto. And with Peter being the film’s focal point, Cage ends up obstructing the story as much as telling it. What, exactly, is this film evenabout?Sexuality? Isolation? Mental health? Reagan-era, yuppie machismo? All of the above? None? Much like our protagonist, viewers could well be seeing things that just aren’t there and spewing incoherent garbage to horrified onlookers as a result. That’sVampire’s Kiss.That’s Nicolas Cage.
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