Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Yuval Adler
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Joel Kinnaman, Kaiwi Lyman,
Cameron Lee Price, Rich Hopkins, Nancy Good, Alexis Zollicoffer, Oliver
McCallum
2021's
Pig
fooled a lot of us into thinking Nicolas Cage may have turned a
corner in his career, delivering an under-stated performance in a movie good
enough to suggest he had picked the role for its quality rather than to pay
off another chunk of his infamous debt. That film reminded us that when he
dials down the histrionics, Cage can be a genuinely good performer.
Pig was quickly followed by the meta comedy
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, in which Cage played a fictional version of himself, allowing the actor
to indulge his worst tendencies. That brief spell in the critical and
commercial limelight was soon followed by another descent into straight to
VOD fare, where directors are happy for Cage to ham it up if it gets their
movies plucked from the virtual shelves by content hungry viewers.
Thing is though, Cage's worst tendencies as an actor are still wildly
entertaining, and they've enlivened many an otherwise unremarkable piece of
VODder. That's the case with Sympathy for the Devil, a bland road movie thriller with an over-the-top Cage performance that
keeps us from nodding off.
The title suggests that Cage might be playing some sort of supernatural
figure here, maybe even Old Nick himself, and Cage seems to take a lot of
inspiration from Al Pacino's memorably hammy turn as Lucifer in
Devil's Advocate. He plays a character whose name we never learn but whom the credits refer
to as The Passenger (taking its cues from
Two-Lane Blacktop and
The Driver, the movie credits every character by their role rather than name), and
his velvet leisure suit and dyed red hair and goatee do little to dispel
the notion that he's the embodiment of Satan.
A man initially known as David (Joel Kinnaman) has an unfortunate
encounter with The Passenger when he barges into his car as he's about to
visit his wife at the hospital where she's about to give birth to their
second child (we've already learned of a previously failed pregnancy by this
point). Pulling a gun on David, The Passenger initially just asks him to
drive to an ambiguous destination, but details gradually seep out as to why
David might have been chosen. The Passenger insists on calling him James,
and makes reference to a past life in Boston which David denies. Is it a
case of mistake identity or is David really hiding past sins?
I doubt many viewers will care for the answer, and it's clearly obvious
early on that David may not be the mild-mannered suburban Dad he's posing
as. As the title suggests, The Passenger's backstory, related in typically
exuberant Cage fashion, gives us a degree of sympathy for his lunatic, but a
lunatic he is, and several innocent parties pay the price for David's
various attempts to free himself from the madman's clutches.
Director Yuval Adler and writer Luke Paradise's film owes
much to the likes of Collateral and The Hitcher, but it lacks the style of the former and the suspense of the latter. It's
really only held together by Cage's crazy glue. The movie's highlight sees
Cage terrorise the staff and patrons of an all-night diner in a scene
reminiscent of Bill Paxton going postal in Near Dark. We get to watch Cage prowl around the set like an uncaged tiger as he
dances and sings to Alicia Bridges' 'I Love the Nightlife', and while we
can't help but laugh, he is undeniably scary. Are movies like this beneath
Cage? Maybe, but it's undeniable that he elevates such fare, and I can't
imagine getting through Sympathy for the Devil without his
distinctive presence.
