The Travolta/Cage Project #37 Deadfall (1993)

Gifs and memes were not a thing back in 1993 or 1989. Yet that did not keep Nicolas Cage from delivering two of the most gif and meme-friendly performances of all time in 1989’s Vampire’s Kiss and 1993’s Deadfall.

Gifs and memes re-contextualize individual moments so audacious, wild and unforgettable that they beg to de-contextualized and shared with friends, co-workers and strangers as part of the white noise of contemporary online life.

Cage is the king of moments. Every moment he is onscreen in Deadfall, Cage is doing something crazy, audacious, original and extreme, something that could only have come from that beautifully blinkered brain of his. 

You could do one of those by-the-minutes podcasts for Deadfall but only for Cage’s performance. Every other worthless, aggravating second would just inspire the hosts to grouse about how unforgivably boring and self-satisfied everything is and what an unforgivable crime against cult cinema it represents that Cage is not onscreen in every shot and every scene in Deadfall, single-handedly redeeming this otherwise worthless endeavor with the sheer atomic force of his insanity. 

I’m not sure what Cage does in Deadfall even qualifies as acting as it is traditionally understood. It’s more like performance art, or pop art, or an elaborate prank at the movie, audience and director’s expense or filmed madness. 

On a scale of 1 to 10 he spends the entire film hovering at an intensity level of about 17. Cage is so next level bonkers here that he makes the yuppie monster he played in Vampire’s Kiss, his previous single craziest performance, seem positively milquetoast by comparison. 

Deadfall plays like the kind of tough, gritty, stylized hardboiled fare Quentin Tarantino, David Mamet or Martin Scorsese might have made if they were talentless posers instead of genuises and auteurs. 

But if co-writer first-time director Christopher Coppola and co-screenwriter Nick Vallelonga, who would go on to win multiple Academy Awards for writing and producing Green Book are pretenders way out of their depth Cage is incontestably the real deal.

Cage makes nothing but strong choices in Deadfall. Cage’s Eddie King isn’t just a heavy drinker and an addict. Cage does not play him as someone who is on a drug or some drugs. Instead, Cage plays Eddie as someone who is on ALL the drugs and ALL the pills ALL the time. 

Uppers, downers, Screaming Meanies, laughing gas, cocaine, crystal meth, whiskey, nitrous, poppers, pills: that’s what this proud degenerate considers a healthy breakfast/morning pick-me-up. It’s a good thing that Eddie’s bloodshot eyes are perpetually covered by dark sunglasses or the only way people would be able to tell that he’s perpetually blitzed out of his mind on a wide array of mood-alterers would be through his body language, slurred speech, bizarre behavior, actions, clothes and general demeanor.

Ah, but Eddie is unfortunately not the protagonist of Deadfall. That distinction belongs Joe Donan (Michael Biehn), a grifter who begins the film accidentally shooting his father/mentor/partner/boss Mike (James Coburn) during an elaborate con with a real bullet instead of a blank. 

Joe’s dying dad implores him to get “the cake” from his twin brother Lou, also played by Coburn in a truly unfortunate turn that disproves my belief that there’s no such thing as a bad James Coburn performance. So Joe visits his gregarious Uncle Lou, who has him work with his flunky Eddie. 

For Deadfall to work, we need to find its protagonist as fascinating as the film does. On paper Joe should be a juicy character and role. He is, after all, a grifting prodigy, a second-generation con man desperate to leave a life of hustles, lies and schemes behind even though it’s the only existence he knows. 

Instead, Joe comes off as a bland vacuum at the center of a movie positively vibrating with insanity and intensity. I’ve never had a problem with Biehn before but he is a total stiff here. Compared to Cage, he’s the most boring man in the history of the world. 

Joe’s hard-boiled, wall-to-wall narration is supposed to establish him as a man of wit and insight, a savvy operator just trying to stay alive in a seedy underworld filled with predators and sharks. Unfortunately, the narration stands out of all the wrong reasons. In a typically clumsy bit of hardboiled attitude, Joe cynically observes, “Shape the con or the con will shape you, pop would say: Wise words my new friend Eddie never learned. He was the type of bad-ass bluff man that was stuck on the high you get from the con and that’s bad news.”

Here’s a hint for attention-hungry screenwriters: if you want to impress the world with the badass lyricism of your hardboiled pulp poetry, your word jazz, maybe refrain from using the word “bad” twice in the same sentence. That, my friends, is bad writing. 

Me and Clint with our Patreon haul at the end of every month.

Much of Eddie’s dialogue consists of yelling different iterations of the word “Fuck!” at the top of his lungs. 

The IMDB lists all of the following as quotes from Eddie, who always looks like he’s about to head over to the Pervert Prom:

“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!”

“What am I, a fucking r-d, man? Am I A FUCKING R-D, HUH? I know what this is! Lou's trying to snuff me out because of his GREASY LITTLE NEPHEW being around! WELL, VIVE LA FUCKING FRANCE, MAN!”

“Hi-fucking-YA!”

“You filthy, double crossing, little fucking filthy, double crossing, filthy, fucking goddamn fucking filthy little RAT!”

As our narrator observes of Eddie in an exquisite bit of understatement, “Well, at least he was a lively fellow.” 

The same, alas, cannot be said of Joe. Eddie meets an unfortunate end  about halfway through Deadfall and the movie instantly becomes several thousand times less entertaining, colorful and memorable, despite going out of its way to be the craziest, wildest, most extreme cult movie ever. 

How extreme? Let’s just say that at one point cult icon Angus Scrimm, the Tall Man of Phantasm fame shows up as an evil, larger than life mobster with a crazy android robot arm with a metallic lobster claw at the end with deadly blades where the hands would be. 

You might imagine that Angus Scrimm with a crazy metallic crustacean claw would be inherently awesome. You would be wrong. VERY wrong. Instead it just feels desperate and sad, like everything in the movie other than Cage’s majestic performance. 

Or take Charlie Sheen’s self-satisfied turn as a pool hustler nicknamed “Fats” who Joe encounters deep into his adventures in the underworld. Wearing a smoking jacket and speaking in a sonorous purr, Fats tells Joe of pool, "This was Sam’s game. Samuel Langhorne Clemons. You know, Mark Twain, The genius behind Huck Finn. Tom Sawyer. Personal favorite of mine, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”

Of course there is no payoff to this miniature monologue beyond Fats telling Joe that Twain played pool to help him deal with writer’s block. I love how Fats goes from referring to a famous writer by his real first name, as it they are friends or relatives, and then moves onto sharing a famous author’s full name before rattling off his most impressive credits, just in case “Sam”, “Samuel Langhorne Clemons” and “Mark Twain” don’t do the trick. 

That’d be like a character today seeing someone reading a detective novel and observing, “Ah, that’s Lew’s favorite kind of book. Lew Alcindor, better known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, NBA legend, Hall of Famer, Airplane! cast-member, activist, author and staff writer for the Veronica Mars reboot. Anyway, he’s a big mystery fan.”

Joe begins the film by conceding that he didn’t have much of a personal relationship with his dad, that it was purely professional. Yet Deadfall nevertheless expects us to be emotionally invested enough in these blurry crime movie archetypes for the inevitable double-crosses and betrayals to register emotionally. 

Cage’s performance in Deadfall anticipates the short attention span of gifs and memes but also Youtube. Youtube is perfect for Cage because it allows cultists and fans to preserve everything that’s great about something like Deadfall (Cage’s performance) while losing everything that doesn’t work (everything else). 

Youtube has been kind to Deadfall. Cage’s performance acquired such a cult over time that in 2017, nearly a quarter century after Deadfall flopped with critics and audiences Cage reprised the character in 2017’s Arsenal despite seemingly dying halfway through Deadfall. 

That is weird even by Nicolas Cage standards. It turns out that Eddie King was just too goddamned epic for just one shitty cult movie. Cage’s operatic performance is bigger than Deadfall and infinitely better and crazier, although that sets the bar ridiculously low. 

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