By now, Nicolas Cage is almost like a parody of a parody. For a while it’s enjoyable to see a talented actor play against type and do a few fun roles. We appreciate the irony and like the seriousness with which they treat an otherwise throwaway role. It’s more interesting than most action movie performances. Ben Kingsley has been doing that a bit lately and it’s cool. Or other guys like Timothy Olyphant in Die Hard 4 and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Mission: Impossible 3. But then they go back to doing more serious stuff again, because it’s easy to get locked into a type of role and never escape.
So maybe Cage doesn’t want to escape. Maybe he enjoys drinking beer out of a human skull and surviving getting shot through his eye hole and shooting up bad guys while he bangs a lady. And as weirdly awesome as all those things in Drive Angry may be in a sick fantasy kind of way, it becomes tiring. We know Nicolas Cage can do more than this. We’ve seen it. He used to make terrific choices, and maybe it’s come down to the roles he’s offered at this point. But there comes a point where you just see a trailer for a movie like The Season of the Witch and think “oh, there goes that Nic Cage again…” We see William Fichtner in Drive Angry and think there’s a character actor having some fun. We see Nicolas Cage in it and wonder how much debt he’s in.
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Published: Apr 9, 2013 11:14 pm