IGN spotlights the Oscar winner's worst films.
Ever since he won the Academy Award as Best Actor for Leaving Las Vegas, Nicolas Cage has made more than his fair share of stinkers. Granted, pre-Oscar he appeared in Fire Birds, Vampire's Kiss, and Amos & Andrew, but you would think winning an Academy Award would improve your filmography. But for every Adaptation or Face/Off or Lord of War, there is, well, the 10 films cited below -- and some of these stinkers were hits!
Now, don't get us wrong: We like Nic Cage, and we sure hope that his new film Knowing, is good so that it will break his losing streak and remind us all of why he became an Oscar-winning star to begin with. Here goes:
10. Con Air
This 1997 action hit follows Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage), an ex-soldier who accidentally kills a man in a drunken fight. Leaving his wife and unborn child behind, Poe enters prison with the intention of keeping quiet and getting out on good behavior. Unfortunately, he's not so lucky. A group of vicious cons, led by Cyrus "The Virus" Grissom (John Malkovich) hijack the plane taking him home. As U.S. Marshal Vince Larkin (John Cusack) tries to keep control on the ground, Cameron becomes a sleeper cell, pretending to help the cons while secretly sabotaging their plans. Obviously, the description of Con Air doesn't really do it justice. It's the Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Loads of explosions, lots of heavy guitar riffs, unbelievable fight scenes, etc. This isn't Brokeback Mountain or Citizen Kane; this is a movie that's meant to be watched with a grain of salt and a taste for action.
9. Windtalkers
Director John Woo's flop added nothing new to the Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Band of Brothers, Pearl Harbor, Enemy at the Gates string of World War II films that hogged screens a few years back. It's done. We get it. It was a terrible war. Instead of using the American movie-going public's high screen literacy about WWII to spin a new tale (that of the Navajo contribution), Woo opts instead to chew up the scenery with blood, guts, and enough soupy war cliches to choke a donkey. Like any good action film, however, too much action is not always a good thing, especially when we don't really care about the people we're watching.
People like Enders (Nic Cage), a mere shell of a man recovering from the horrific death all around him in the opening battle sequence. He skulks around a hospital (and indeed the movie) recovering from a grenade blast with blood and grim dripping out of his ear, a broken man. When a nurse (Frances O'Connor) takes an interest in him (a pointless love story diversion), he gets himself re-assigned to protect codetalker Yahzee (Adam Beach). The two develop a friendship that is ultimately put to the test when Yahzee is in trouble and yadda yadda yadda. Not since Jeff Bridges in Blown Away have we seen a man cry out in pain so many times. You don't need a translator to decipher that Windtalkers is dead in the water – that is if you care about such things as story, plot, decent characters and non-gratuitous violence.
8. Gone in 60 Seconds
Randall "Memphis" Raines (Nicolas Cage) used to be the best car thief in Southern California. After walking away from the life for six years, Raines returns to the world of grand theft auto in an attempt to save the life of his younger brother, Kip (Giovanni Ribisi). It seems that Kip has decided to follow in big brother's footsteps. After botching the theft of a Porsche for psychotic crime figure Raymond Calitri (Christopher Eccleston), Memphis is given a deal: his brother's life in return for 50 luxury cars in 72 hours. Realizing he can't do all of this alone, Raines hooks up with as much of his old crew (which includes Angelina Jolie and Robert Duvall) as possible.
The script is a mess. The "back-story" about Raines, his girlfriend, his mother, the car that has eluded him all these years, rival car thieves, etc. falls into the "who cares?" category after about 20 minutes. What we have here is the making of a classic heist film, but the film gets bogged down in unnecessary characters, plot contrivances and some stunts. It's supposed to be a film about professionals doing their job, but winds up being a mish mash of love story, special effects and characters you just don't care about. Gone in 60 Seconds isn't just predictable, it's painfully predictable.
7. 8MM
This dreary 1999 thriller from director Joel Schumacher (Batman & Robin) and Andrew Kevin Walker (Se7en) follows private eye Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage), who is hired to take a look at a snuff film to see if someone actually dies in it. During the course of his investigation in the underbelly of Los Angeles, Welles encounters various shady characters played by Joaquin Phoenix, James Gandolfini, and Peter Stormare.
Some critics, such as Roger Ebert, praised this Neo-Noir, but we found it to be an oppressively dark, gratuitously seedy rehash of scummy material better explored in films such as Hardcore and Walker's own Se7en. Cage plays Welles as a family man who descends into hell, but the film seems to have trapped the actor in a different sort of movie underworld ever since.
6. Snake Eyes
This Brian DePalma-directed flop follows crooked, flashy New Jersey cop Rick Santoro (Nic Cage), who becomes embroiled in the investigation of the assassination of the secretary of defense during the heavyweight boxing championship at an Atlantic City casino. Santoro uncovers a conspiracy implicating a number of people in attendance at the bout (including Carla Gugino, Gary Sinise and Stan Shaw). The visually savvy but critically reviled Snake Eyes succumbs under the weight of its litany of genre cliches. It's too bad, too, given the sheer amount of talent involved, including Cage who actually does what he can to keep the viewer engaged in all the goings-on.
5. Captain Corelli's Mandolin
This romantic melodrama (and box office flop) is set in Greece during WWII when Italy, allied with Nazi Germany and Japan, occupied the nation. The story recounts how the lives of the simple inhabitants of a rustic village were altered by the (not-so-threatening) presence of the Italian army. Pelagia (Penelope Cruz), the strong-willed daughter of the village doctor (John Hurt), and the mandolin-playing, free-spirited Captain Antonio Corelli (Nicolas Cage), an Italian officer "assigned" to live with Pelagia's family, fall in love. Like Romeo and Juliet, their romance will lead to tragedy.
This boring melodrama is hindered by banal dialogue, clich? characters and the woefully miscast leads (oddly enough, all the major Greek roles are played by non-Greeks). Corelli aspired to be an epic love story, social satire, and a wrenching war story but it fails because it's painfully contrived and sappy.
4. Ghost Rider
While not quite the train wreck that Elektra was, Ghost Rider is one of Marvel's worst (but commercially successful) movies. And it has nothing to do with the quality of the special effects, which look better in motion than they do in still photos. No, Ghost Rider fails for the same reason every bad movie does: poor storytelling and bad acting. Comic book fan Nicolas Cage clearly gives the title role of Johnny Blaze his all, and he is the best thing in the film. He grounds it in reality and gives his character personality and, ironically, soul.
Bottom line: Ghost Rider doesn't work because of the writing. The romance between young Johnny and Roxanne is pure schlock, right down to them carving their initials in an old tree, and it isn't sufficiently developed when they are reunited. The dialogue is almost uniformly bad, with only Cage and Elliott able to make their cheesy lines work.
As a comic book adaptation, Ghost Rider is largely faithful to the lore, but it makes one fatal alteration. In the comics, Johnny willingly sells his soul to the devil. In the movie, he essentially gets duped; seriously, even the devil knows that a paper cut doesn't count! Turning Johnny into a victim of circumstance rather than someone who made a mistake and then has to redeem himself robs the character and the film of depth and integrity. That decision was almost as bad as Blackheart's dialogue. Almost.
Unfortunately, that also summarizes everything that's wrong with the film, too: It is loud, dumb as a bag of hammers, and tacky. This is an all-star, over-the-top mess, but Nic Cage bears the brunt of it thanks to his ridiculous mullet and wifebeater-wearing, pretentious macho hijinks. This film, coming on the heels of The Rock and his Oscar win in Leaving Las Vegas, marks the point in Cage's career where the paycheck and box office gross began to outweigh the strengths of the material.
3. Bangkok Dangerous
This slow-moving and sour remake of the Asian film of the same name features Cage sleep-walking through his role as Joe, a world-weary, loner assassin who heads to Thailand to perform the textbook "one last job." As an English-speaking white man in Bangkok, Joe finds himself the proverbial fish out of water. His mission is to carry out a handful of contract killings on behalf of crimelord Surat, after which he will retire. As almost every other hitman movie has taught us, nothing ever goes according to plan for an assassin.
Bangkok Dangerous is riddled with as many genre cliches as it is bullets. There's the loner hitman who cannot allow himself any attachments (romantic or otherwise). That's because he has four rules that he lives by, which he will, of course, break one by one as the story proceeds. That's fine, though, because this is his last job and then he's going to walk away. Hopefully, the hitman's lover won't find out what he really does for a living because losing her would rob him of his one last shot at redemption or a normal life. The hitman can't quit his trade, however, until he takes on a pupil (who reminds him of his younger self) and mentors him in his dark art.
2. Next
Las Vegas showroom magician Cris Johnson (Nicolas Cage) is tormented by both a gift and a curse: He can see a few minutes into the future. Sick of the examinations he underwent as a child and the interest of government and medical establishments, he lies low under the assumed name "Frank Cadillac," performing cheap tricks and living off small-time gambling "winnings." But when a terrorist group threatens to detonate a nuclear device in Los Angeles, FBI agent Callie Ferris (Julianne Moore) must use all her wiles to capture Cris and convince him to help her stop the impending attack. Unfortunately, the villains have discovered Cris' Achilles' heel: his newfound love interest Liz (Jessica Biel), who somehow manages to expand Cris' clairvoyant abilities beyond a mere two minutes (insert stupid sex joke here). After Liz is captured, Cris and the FBI must race against time to save her and L.A. from certain doom.
Next has a nifty but ultimately frustrating gimmick that propels it forward, a high concept that can't mask the fact that the story and characters are seriously lacking in dimension. While Cris is an affable freak, is that credit due more to Cage -- who specializes in playing such charming oddballs -- than to what's on the page? While Next has a few fun and inventive moments sprinkled throughout, mostly revolving around the use of Cris' power, it collapses into an exhausting litany of action movie cliches before exposing itself as a total mindjob in the end.
1. The Wicker Man
Director Neil LaBute's remake of the 1973 cult classic stars Nicolas Cage as Edward Malus, a cop who is haunted by the visceral image of a car that exploded while he was attempting to rescue the mother and daughter within. He soon receives a mysterious letter from a past flame he has been unable to forget. In the letter, she asks for his help to find her missing daughter. Compelled by the letter, Malus travels to a mysterious private island where he discovers a cult community of women living within a pagan society hundreds of years removed from modern times. After speaking with his former lover Willow (Kate Beahan), Malus sets out to turn the island over searching for her missing daughter. Ellen Burstyn portrays the island's overseer, Sister Summersisle. Leelee Sobieski, Molly Parker and Francis Conroy play supporting parts.
My word, this is a bad, baaad film. What starts as a decent enough thriller soon devolves into one ludicrous sequence after another, culminating with Cage punching a woman out to steal her bicycle, masquerading in a bear costume to infiltrate a cult ritual, and finally being subjected to torture by bees -- the bees!! -- before the islanders stage their own version of Man on Fire. Cage's histrionics only make the finale more ludicrous and unfortunate since the same basic ending worked fine in the original film.
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