Well...maybe. Still don't know about romantic zombie movies. I guess that I would find zombies as more sympathetic (and human) creatures than, say, islamofascists. But that's not much of a hurdle, is it?
And now, a cautionary tale...
And yeah, I knew better.
I always know better than to let mrs. trapeze pick movies but occasionally yield in a bow to marital harmony or some such ridiculous notion. You would think, though, that after literally 2.5+ decades of damned near perfection in picking cinematic stinkers she would give up and completely surrender that responsibility to me. Well, think again because a few nights ago we experienced Nic Cage in (ugh, I still can't believe I volunteered for this) "Rage."
Now, I hadn't read a review of this thing but there were plenty of clues that it was a total dog's breakfast without having to rely on a critic's opinion.
First of all, I don't remember seeing "Rage" in theaters. Ever. Since I watched it I have looked for box-office data on it and have found nothing so that sort of firms up my original suspicion that it had a very limited release...perhaps one night in one theater. I'm guessing that Cage skipped the premier night showing. (Hard to believe that it had a $21 million dollar budget. Really hard to believe.) Plus, it has the repugnant Danny Glover as a co-star. Try and remember the last time that Glover was in anything of any consequence. And there is always the knowledge that Cage is in serious debt and will do just about anything that pays a few bucks. This looked like a strong contender for one of "those" films.
And it was. An absolutely horrible script highlighted with uninspired acting and tepid direction that telegraphed the
surprise/shock ending just about from the very beginning. mrs. trapeze threw in the towel at about the twenty minute mark and suggested that we watch something else. I refused.
She needed to be punished for selecting this monstrosity. So, what was the plot? Cage plays a commercial construction contractor who used to be involved with organized crime, specifically the Irish mob. Of course. Cage looks Irish, after all, right? He and his second wife leave his sixteen-year-old daughter at home with two obviously horny male classmates who are eyeing the liquor cabinet (yeah, I know...
anyone would do that) and go out to a dinner party. Somehow the police know where he is because they fetch him from the restaurant just after midnight. They tell him that his daughter has been abducted from their home. When they return home they find the place crawling with law enforcement, as you might expect, doing a lot of police-looking stuff...taking pictures and picking sh*t up with tweezers and such. The two male classmates tell of a home invasion where the daughter is carried off by three assailants. There is a sign of a struggle with lots of broken furniture and glass and such. Cage freaks out and angrily demands to know why the two boys didn't do more to prevent the abduction of his daughter. The next day Cage visits one of the boys at home and asks him for details about the kidnappers...their accents, their clothing, how they smelled, etc. The boy tells him that he noticed none of these things. Or that he couldn't remember because it was scary or something. Presumably this same tale was told to the police and they believed him and his friend. By now it's been twelve hours and there are no ransom demands or anything.
Okay, you can probably figure out right now who the guilty party is. But Cage and the police can't and here is where it gets really stupid, really fast. The police call him and tell him that they have 1) found his daughter, dead, of course and 2) that she was killed with a shot to the head at close range and that the bullet came from a Russian Tokarev pistol. Cage immediately concludes that the Russian mob is responsible and goes on a killing spree which quickly decimates their local ranks. I could go on and on with the plot details that follow but that's pretty much it...Cage acting all pissy and furious and killing a bunch of Russian mobsters. At one point Cage looks up at the sky, opens his mouth wide and just howls with, well...rage, I guess. This is supposed to really, really convince you that Cage is genuinely angry or that if he was really, really angry before he is really, really, really angry now. If Cage is a method actor I'm guessing that he was visualizing where he is now in his career and those two times where he received an Oscar. That would do it for most people.
Did I mention where this action takes place? No? Oh, well...you probably assumed, like me, that it just has to be in Mobile, Alabama because everyone knows that Mobile is the very heart of the Russian and Irish organized crime world.
Everyone knows
that.
Danny Glover plays one of the most inept police detectives ever depicted on screen. He knows of Cage's mob history and yet never bothers to assign someone to surveil him. No, not even after Russian mobster corpses start showing up literally everywhere, killed in just about all ways imaginable. He even drops in on Cage at a diner and tells him a story over coffee of how he, himself, could have gone off on a killing spree once-upon-a-time but didn't and afterward was very glad that he hadn't. Glover all but tells him, "Hey, I know that you are murdering Russian mobsters and maybe you should lighten up a bit and let us, the grossly incompetent and clueless law enforcement placeholders, get to the bottom of this crime." Seriously. That scene happens. I half expected to see Glover at some point
interrogating an organ grinder about his "minky."
The plot holes are numerous. The killers are obvious to the audience from the word "go." The ridiculous nature of the police non-investigation is beyond annoying and nearly irrelevant to the plot. Example: How do you know that someone was killed with a shot to the skull at close range from a Russian Tokarev pistol? I looked it up and there are a couple of possibilities with that notion. (The "close range" thing is easy, I guess, because of powder burns. They don't mention that but I will give it to them.) As for the murder weapon that they mysteriously identify...the Tokarev fires a 7.62x25mm cartridge. The bullet can be either a copper jacketed steel core (considered armor piercing and illegal for US import) or copper washed steel plated lead core. Either way, a shot to the head from close range is unlikely to leave much of a bullet behind for examination. The steel core is going to zip right through and leave nothing and the lead core is also likely to go right through. With a typical muzzle velocity of 1500 ft/sec. and 400 ft/lbs of energy I like its odds of going cleanly through a skull (monster exit wound, though) with no recoverable evidence. But that's just my opinion. I'm guessing, though, that there are several Soviet/Chinese/Eastern bloc pistols that shoot this round so I don't know how they could conclude that it was
the gun that killed the girl. Basically, it's just bullsh*t designed to allow Cage some sort of justification to go on his killing spree rather than apply common sense as to who the actual killer(s) might be.
(Incidentally, Cage goes to the morgue and kisses his deceased daughter. Her skull is remarkably intact)
In one outrageously ridiculous scene there is a meeting between the Irish mob boss and the Russian mob boss. Perhaps the Irish guy picked up the red phone in his office and said, "Dimitry, let's you and me and several of our henchmen meet up on top of a parking garage in downtown Mobile and have a pow-wow about all of your guys getting killed." So they do that. They meet on top of a parking garage in downtown Mobile, Alabama and within less than one minute they start shooting at each other. All of the henchmen are killed immediately so that only the two mob bosses are left. Francis, the Irishman, is out of ammo, though, and continues to pull the trigger on his revolver like an adolescent girl (or liberal media type, but I repeat myself) expecting it to shoot. The Russian boss walks up to him and blows his head off because he, like Francis, inexplicably wasn't killed in the preceding hail of gunfire. And now Dimitry is really pissed off, too, because he has to go find some more Russian mobsters and chase down Nic Cage. I guess no one noticed all of those gunshots in downtown Mobile because that kind of thing happens all the time in broad daylight. Certainly Danny Glover wasn't around or if he was he probably thought, "Kids with fireworks" or something like that and went back to eating donuts.
But that's really all the movie is about...Cage and a couple of his buddies killing everyone in sight who is even vaguely associated with the Russian mob. One particularly memorable (and ridiculous) scene involves these three clods paying a visit to some black guy who is supposed to "know stuff." He tells them he doesn't know anything (because he doesn't and everyone knows this except for Cage and company) and they proceed to "persuade" him to spill his guts. The guy has a girlfriend who appears to be drugged to the point of unconsciousness so one of Cage's friends take a rope, ties it to a cinder block (these things just happen to be present in this guy's apartment) and puts the other end of the rope around her neck. Then without any warning at all he tosses the brick out the window (chortling maniacally) which causes the rope to begin to strangle the girl. My thought, based on the length of the rope and the weight of a standard cinder block, is that the girl's neck would most likely have been snapped instantly. But it doesn't and she somehow survives although, being drugged out, she is all but oblivious to the throat injury.
When the "shock" ending eventually rolls around it is more of a relief than anything else because we know that the credits are coming soon and our misery will be terminated shortly. But you just can't get those 92 minutes of your life back, can you?
Sometimes a movie can be so incredibly awful that it is enjoyable to watch. It's funny because it's so bad. This isn't one of those movies. It's bad on the worst possible level: It's dull and predictable. Not exactly the words one would like used to describe an "action thriller." It might have been salvaged if they had only pushed the detestable Danny Glover off a building or had him drown slowly in a submerged car or had his fingers yanked off one at a time or boiled in oil or crushed by a steam roller or decapitated with a ninja sword or burned in a grease fire but unfortunately none of those things happen.
So, there...avoid this one. Even on free tv it should be avoided.
And mrs. trapeze is very, very sorry and promises to not select another movie for a very long time. But she usually forgets transgressions such as this so I am probably in for another one in the not too distant future.