Nicolas Cage's Wonderfully Stupid 2012 Thriller Stolen is the Seeking Justice/Con Air Pastiche We Never Knew We Needed!
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I enjoyed the pleasingly preposterous 2012 Nicolas Cage thriller Stolen when I saw and reviewed it at the time of its release and dug it even more the second time around. Yet I remembered almost nothing about it from my first viewing beyond a vague sense that it was VERY similar to a VERY recent Cage movie.
I was right in a way that explains why the movie might have disappeared almost instantly from my memory. Stolen is, in fact, distractingly similar to a movie Cage put out a year earlier in a clammy haze of financial desperation, 2011’s Seeking Justice.
Seeking Justice saw Cage running around New Orleans in a desperate panic while getting jerked around mercilessly by a larger-than-life bad guy played by a character actor luxuriating in outsized villainy. Stolen ALSO sees Cage running around New Orleans in desperate panic while getting jerked around mercilessly by a larger-than-life bad guy played by a character actor luxuriating in outsized villainy.
But Stolen is also a low-key reprise of Con Air that similarly casts Cage as an ex-convict with a strong moral code and a deep-seated desire to forge an emotional connection with a daughter he buys a stuffed animal that reunites its star with Con Air helmer Simon West.
Cage plays Will Montgomery, a master bank robber with a sketchy crew composed of wild-eyed loose cannon Vincent Kensey (Josh Lucas), Frankenstein-sized maniac Hoyt (Con Air alum M.C Gainey) and nice lady Riley Simms (Malin Akerman).
Riley looks like she smells like sunshine, rainbows and daydreams and is unfailingly pleasant but she nevertheless made some strange, unfortunate choices somewhere along the way that led to her being subject to the caveman-like sexual harassment of Gainey’s malevolent giant.
That’s one of the many downsides to being in the underworld. When a plus-sized creep like Hoyt subjects you to his leering advances there’s no Human Resources you can report him to.
Stolen adorably establishes that its hero really digs the Credence Clearwater Revival. It’s not unlike how The Rock went to great pains to establish that Cage REALLY loves this British band called The Beatles and Wild at Heart essentially finds Cage playing Elvis Presley while also, once again, making it canon that his character enjoys the music of the King of Rock and Roll.
Will loves CCR (as us true fans call them) so much that he listens to their music as a good look charm before doing his crimes. Then a bank heist goes awry and he ends up burning ten million dollars of ill-gotten loot, much to the aggravation of Vincent, who loses a leg after getting shot in the aftermath of the robbery and goes from pretty damn crazy to a level of crazy seldom seen outside the performances of Klaus Kinski.
Lucas straight up tries to out Nicolas Cage Nicolas Cage here and largely succeeds through bleary, crazed excess. You’ve never seen Josh Lucas quite like this, because if he attempted a performance in a movie not pitched at this crazed level of goofy, tongue-in-cheek comic melodrama the director would take him aside and tell him that he should stop what he’s doing because it’s fucking insane and ruining the movie.
looking good!
In this context, however, Lucas’ degenerate scenery-chewing, over-acting and all-around nuttiness are a huge part of what makes the movie such kooky fun.
Lucas’ bad guy drives a taxi when not not executing revenge against his old partner with a cracked-out expression on his grizzled visage that suggests that he’s been living on crystal meth, Monster energy drinks and beef jerky since faking his death nearly a decade earlier.
If you do not not want to be hassled during Mardi Gras, driving a cab is a very bad way to avoid attracting attention but Lucas’ crazy-eyed kook is very committed to real-life Taxi Driver cosplay.
So he grabs Will’s resentful daughter Alison (Sami Gayle), chucks her in the trunk of his taxi and demands ten million dollars in exchange for her release. The hate-poisoned maniac doesn’t know that Will set it ablaze eight years earlier.
Having the bad guy drive a cab throughout much of the proceedings facilitates any number of goofy comic moments, like a very enraged Vincent accidentally picking up an Australian tourist who can’t stop talking about how long it’s been since he got his “donger dipped” and a scene-stealing dispatcher.
In my favorite line in the movie the dispatcher responds to the police asking him about Vincent by saying that he personally never had a problem with him, despite him obviously radiating dangerous killer vibes that can be detected from outer space, “He scares my kids when they come to visit their daddy at work.”
Then, after the exact right amount of time, he continues, “My kids are in their twenties.”
Vincent should creep out kids of every age. Lucas doesn’t just go big and crazy, he goes Zandalee big and crazy with his ratty mop of Jesus/Kurt Cobain hair, prosthetic leg and air of total and complete abandon.
If Stolen had any more New Orleans, or rather N’Awlins’ flavor, the Neville Brothers would be in the background of every shot on a Mardi Gras float with a Hurricane in one hand and a Po’ Boy in the other.
Stolen’s cartoonishly broad take on New Orleans works because the whole movie operates on the level of a pulpy, B movie fever dream cartoon. West brings the same energetic sleaziness and drive-in panache to Stolen that he did to Con Air.
Stolen stole my heart. If you open yourself up to its unapologetic goofiness and vulgarity, it might steal your heart too.
Within reason, of course.
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