Best of 2023: What the Hell is Going on With John Cusack These Days?

Fictional

Because I am professionally obligated to watch every movie Nicolas Cage and John Travolta have made—even the bad ones—for my podcast Travolta/Cage and the Travolta/Cage Project and am also writing a book about every American narrative film about movie-making—even the bad ones—I spend a lot of time on Tubi. 

When I finish watching a godawful late-period Nicolas Cage vehicle or unwatchable low-budget stinker about the film industry Tubi boots up another film for me to watch. 

For reasons I both do and do not understand, at least half the time the movie that Tubi wants me to see is a late-period, direct-to-video John Cusack vehicle. 

This is TOTALLY a real movie

These movies look both uniquely, unforgivably terrible and made-up. They’re what We Hate Movies refers to as “imaginary movies.” These are bizarre obscurities with big stars that you’ve never heard of and also don’t seem real. 

I'm talking about obscurities like 2014’s The Bag Man, a movie that not only allegedly exists but pairs the High Fidelity star with fellow pop icons Robert De Niro and Crispin Glover. 

It’s apparently a Tarantino-style gab-fest based on the book The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption by Swiss Jungian scholar Marie-Louise von Franz. 

Can’t believe I missed this completely authentic movie that exists.

Have you seen The Bag Man? Of course you haven’t. No one has. It doesn’t exist. Oh sure, it might appear to be steaming widely and available at Redbox but I’m pretty sure that movie doesn’t exist, like many of Cusack’s other films from this period. 

Take 2014’s The Prince. This direct-to-streaming dud pairs the star of Say Anything with Bruce Willis, Jason Patric, 50 Cent, Korean pop star Rain and Joe Mantegna’s daughter. If a movie with all of those formerly big names were made and released don’t you think you would have heard of it? But you haven’t, because, like many of Cusack’s newer films, The Prince doesn’t actually exist. 

I cannot be convinced otherwise. Perhaps the most egregiously imaginary movie on Cusack’s resume is the Swiss 2017 science fiction movie Singularity. The film was finished in 2013 as Aurora but apparently lacked sufficient star-power because four years after the film was ostensibly finished new scenes were shot with Cusack—who only interacts with one other character in the film—so that it could be released internationally. 

Why does the 54 year old Cusack look like a pouty teenager here?

I know Cusack’s career isn’t exactly firing on all cylinders these days but that sounds way too sketchy for a man who was once a big movie star and beloved actor. 

On one level I know exactly what happened to Cusack. Like Nicolas Cage, Bruce Willis, Robert De Niro and John Travolta he fell into the trap of churning out interchangeable stinkers for the direct-to-video market because you can make millions doing very little work that way. 

I bet Cusack REALLY coveted a role in the Michael Mann movie BLACK HAT.

Cusack has been in three of the movies I’ve covered for Travolta/Cage. Their collaboration began on a high note with the cult classic Con Air when they were both top box-office attractions. Their next two films together reflected the dire shape of their careers. 

Cusack with his signature dumb black baseball hat.

The Better Off Dead star scored a seemingly juicy role in 2013’s The Frozen Ground as real-life serial killer Robert Hansen, who maintained an image of bland respectability while raping and hunting sex workers for sport. But Cusack delivered an unconvincing, one-note performance and the movie was dumped onto home video like pretty much everything he was doing at this point, including his next Cage collaboration, the 2017 dud Arsenal, which is notable only for a particularly unhinged performance by Cage inexplicably playing the same character he played decades earlier in the otherwise completely unrelated Deadfall. 

Hey, look! It’s that dumb black baseball hat Cusack wears in all his movies!

One of the many strange aspects of Cusack’s late period career is that he didn’t really even make pure action movies other than Con Air until fairly deep into middle age. Grosse Point Blanke is an action comedy but it’s more interested in dark comedy than fisticuffs or shootouts. 

Cusack’s aggressively undistinguished stint as a C-list action movie staple didn’t really begin until 2006’s The Contract, which not so coincidentally was the first of his movies to go direct-to-video. 

I suspect that Cusack appears in a lot of low-budget action movies, often playing a villain, not because he has any real passion for the genre or the movies that he makes but rather because once you reach a certain age you make modestly budgeted action movies for the international market because those are the kinds of movies and roles that you’re offered so those end up being the roles you play. 

As with Cage and De Niro, Cusack did not lose his talent when his career went into the crapper. Every few years or so Cusack proves that he can act and not just wave around a gun. 

In 2014 Cusack worked with David Cronenberg on Maps to the Stars. The result was one of the Canadian auteur’s weakest films but I’m sure he found it far more creatively fulfilling than the generic thrillers he was making at the time. 

There it is again. Cusack LOVES that stupid hat.

That same year Cusack played an older Brian Wilson in the well-received biopic Love and Mercy. A year later Cusack worked with Spike Lee on Chi-Raq. 

Of course Cusack’s primary preoccupation these days is popping off on social media constantly like a college freshman who just discovered Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky and can’t wait to tell everybody they know about them. 

It’s tough to grow older when the world falls in love with you as a teenager and fresh-faced young man. Actors who are boyishly handsome in their youth often age in strange and not entirely pleasing ways. That’s true of Cusack, who these days conveys a certain weary sadness and resignation that doesn’t necessarily have to do with the characters that he’s playing. 

I’d love to see someone like Quentin Tarantino or Sofia Coppola write a meaty role for Cusack that made inspired use of the exhausted melancholy that characterizes his performances these days. I don’t know if Cusack will experience a comeback like the one Cage is currently enjoying but I suspect that he will keep on making garbage movies strictly for the money because that, unfortunately, is what veterans actors have to do these days just to stay in a game and an industry that worships youth and is slow to forgive actors for the unforgivable crime of getting older. 

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