*Note: Colour Out of Space isn't out in Australia yet and actually looks like an excellent flick, so I can't really talk about it, which is a shame, because it has such a low bar to clear in order to become the best Nicolas Cage film of 2019.
If you're wondering why you've never heard of any of these, it's because they're all straight-to-VOD B-grade schlock, and none of them are particularly good. Often the most these types of films can offer is a memorable enough Cage performance to end up on silly lists like this one, so my reactions here are largely going to be based upon how I measure his presence and type of performance in the film; I call it the Cage Rage Gauge.
Nicolas Cage I can understand, but they somehow roped Laurence Fishburne in to this as well. Each plays a drug runner, but they are two very different people: Cage plays a fastidious chef who supports his family and treats all of his work professionalism, while Fishburne is a perverted drug addict who neglects every aspect of his life, including his daughter. Both men are hired by their boss to escort the next load of cocaine after the last couple have come in light and cut with other drugs, with Cage given the responsibility of figuring out who's responsible, which, surprise surprise, turns out to be Fishburne. During their trek, Fishburne leaves Cage to die, but Cage survives and has Fishburne hunted down, but Cage gets murdered in the end by a DEA agent fed up with the system that perpetuates the war on drugs just because people like Cage are otherwise respectable citizens. That last part doesn't exactly come out of nowhere, but it's just one of many elements in the film that somehow bloat a movie that's only 100 minutes long; I didn't even mention the subplot involving Clifton Collins Jr. as a small time drug farmer, which is itself just the beginning of the journey the drugs take to get from South America to the US.
It seems like the film tries to include all of this stuff to give a perspective on the war on drugs that looks at the lives of as many people affected by it as possible, going so far as to show every price point of the drugs at each step it takes towards the US, but despite its attempts to give the whole thing a sense of style, calling every character by a title ("The Agent in Charge", "The Cook", "The Man", etc) and trying to give as much importance as possible to the escalating details about the drugs, the film never seems to become in any way interesting. It's somewhat competent and consistent in its direction, but for every cut-throat betrayal and sickening reveal of corruption, it can't quite coalesce in to a engaging experience, beyond its final moment.
Cage Rage Gauge: Abysmal. Cage is barely in half the movie despite being a headliner, and his performance is the most understated on this list. He gets one scene where you'd think he'd have a chance to really cut loose, but he just hisses a few words through clenched teeth and then tries to look intimidating while walking on crutches. Fishburne is much more entertaining here, although calling anything in a movie I fell asleep watching (twice) "entertaining" is a bit of a stretch.
4. Primal
Cage plays an exotic animal hunter who's managed to captured an extremely rare white jaguar (ironically, the film is produced by Lionsgate), and intends to sell it to the highest bidder, but his trip home is hampered by the inclusion of several military men aboard the same cargo ship, transporting a government assassin who went rogue (played by Kevin Durand). Obviously, the assassin gets out and lets out all the animals, including the jaguar, so Cage has to work with the soldiers to capture both safely. There's also an awkward romance subplot between Cage and the military doctor (Famke Janssen) sent along to help the assassin with his seizures. The romance coaxes Cage towards ostensibly caring more for the animals he captures, which ties back in to the whole "who's really the beast?" thing the film has going on with the parallel between Durand's assassin and the jaguar. The film is oddly sympathetic to Durand's plight, a man made the way he is by a government that wanted to use him as a tool of destruction, but apart from that, the film is, much like Running with the Devil, frightfully boring. It's overall basically ok (for a cheap and derivative B-movie), but despite the more focused story, the film is never particularly engaging, mostly relying on imitating familiar action story beats in order to pretend something exciting is happening. If I hadn't made this list, I would have forgotten about it as soon as I'd finished it.
Cage Rage Gauge: Pretty Terrible. He's in most of the movie this time, at least, but apart from a couple of over-enunciated words he doesn't offer the sort of expressive performance you'd hope for. Once again, he's outshone by another member of the cast, this time by Kevin Durand's bouncy psychosis, which is the only fun in the film.
3. Kill Chain
It's a story about a (shocker) chain of kills that lead to Cage's hotel one fateful night. An assassin kills another assassin who's then killed by a corrupt cop who steals the assassin's pay but is killed by a jealous madame after giving the pay to his girlfriend, who winds up hiding in Cage's hotel before another fight and then a shootout ensue. It's a convoluted series of tenuously connected stories that serve as an excuse for Cage to go all noir, serving up cheeky one-liners and generally looking broodingly in every direction while the film occasionally gets sexy around him. A more memorable experience than the previous two, this one at least has the decency to revel a little in it's exploitative, B-grade nature.
Cage Rage Gauge: Actually kind of alright. He isn't in enough of the film, and he doesn't have any outbursts, but the film offers a few fun moments, including a pretty decent scenery-chewing monologue and a couple lines of absurdly hilarious dialogue
2. Grand Isle
This one isn't the best movie on the list, in fact it might be the worst, but it's easily the most memorable. A young husband and father named Buddy tells the story of how he ended up in a police station, bloodied and bruised and with the body of another man in his truck. It involves this man, down on his luck and struggling to make ends meat, working for an afternoon for Nicolas Cage, fixing a fence before a hurricane hits the little old town of Grand Isle. Cage is a former Marine, discharged for an injury, and he respects our Buddy for his own service in the Navy, although a few barbs about their respective differences are thrown back and forth. It all seems relatively ok until Cage's wife gets mad at him for forgetting their anniversary, and takes it out on him by hitting on Buddy and taking advantage of the situation once the hurricane sets in and he has to stay the night with them. A few devious turns later and it turns out that they're keeping people in their basement and breeding them because they could never have children of their own, and the dead man in Buddy's truck was one of the men they'd captured.
This movie throws everything at the wall to what will stick, and in the process it's just kind of an insane mess that's so hilarious to watch unfold that you can't help but appreciate the film for how bad it all turns out. There's even a performance by Kelsey Grammer of all people as the small-town detective trying to get to the bottom of the case, who speaks in a Southern drawl that would put Foghorn Leghorn to shame, but the film doesn't even have the genius to put him next to Cage until the very end, in a hostage situation/shootout that sees Cage in his Marine uniform call-out the "system that doesn't give a sh*t about me or my fellow Marines". The confrontation is really limp compared to the sheer insanity that preceded it, and the military angle is too poorly explored to feel like the culmination to anything.
Cage Rage Gauge: Insane. Cage gets a few choice lines that are hilarious in both writing and delivery ("when was the you time you had your... uh, cock, um, sucked?") and the confrontations between him and his wife are almost funny enough to distract from how terrible everything else is.
Don't get me wrong, this movie is as bad as the rest of them, but this film finally seems to understand exactly why an actor like Cage is appealing. A father fresh out of prison meets his son and tries to make up for lost time, but seems torn between that devotion and his lust for revenge. Cage paces himself through a lot of turmoil here, knowing just how quiet to keep in order to make his outbursts feel that much more expressive. What's more is that the rest of the film has this strange, amateurish passion that I can't quite put my finger on, like this was everyone else's first film and they were just happy to work with him. The son is the personification of this; he's kind of awkward and never feels natural when he speaks, but this sort of works in the movie's favour, the strained relationship of the characters masking the performance. Of course, then the movie has to go ruin itself with a nonsense twist that reveals the son was dead the whole time and that Cage has been hallucinating him. Admittedly, this revelation is well foreshadowed, and it leads to the best scene in the movie, but it's also really dumb; there's a scene where Cage goes and saves his son from a drug den, but who is he saving if his son isn't there? It's not enough to have a relatively intriguing juxtaposition between thirst for revenge and the catharsis found in moving on, no, we have to have some insane twist that essentially forces the film to its conclusion and leaves Cage standing as the only decent thing about the film.
Cage Rage Gauge: Perfect. Cage gets to express a full range of emotions here, and does so with a gusto that's so cartoonish it loops right back around to being believable, even despite the film's ridiculous twist. You'll never hear the word "beef" the same again.
So, what did I learn?
I suppose there are some unifying themes between all these movies; each one seems fed up with the system, expressing this through a character that represents a group that's used by it (a DEA agent, an assassin, a Marine, etc.). I was also reminded that you can't cage Cage, you have to let him be free to express himself in the way that feels the most "Cage-y", otherwise his performances are as flat and boring as anyone willing to sell their name for a paycheck. Seriously, if your movie's going to be an otherwise inept or completely forgettable experience, you may as well try to get the most out of what Nicolas Cage can do. A Score to Settle wasn't the best film on this list because it was the most well-made, it was the best because, despite everything else about the movie, Cage was allowed to be Cage.
