2017's Mom and Dad Fruitfully Combined the Corny Dad and Homicidal Maniac Sides of Nicolas Cage's Persona
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You do not need to be a mom or dad to appreciate the 2017 instant cult classic Mom and Dad but if you have children that you absolutely adore and would protect with your life but also occasionally want to kill you’ll enjoy it on a whole different, deeper, darker level.
Writer-director Brian Taylor, who you might know and revere as one half of Neveldine/Taylor, the marvelous maniacs who made Crank as well as Crank 2: High Voltage is ultimately up for more than cheap shock.
Mom and Dad’s subtext is so pronounced and close to the surface that it’s practically text. The metaphor may be screamingly obvious but that doesn’t make it any less potent or incisive.
In Mom and Dad Nicolas Cage and Selma Blair play Brent and Kendall. They’re parents who, like all halfway decent parents, have sacrificed their own dreams and aspirations for the sake of their children.
As the film opens Brent is in the midst of a hellacious mid-life crisis that, like so many, involves the construction of a man-cave, complete with a pool table, so that he has somewhere to escape when the pressure of being a dad and a husband get to be too much.
Sometimes I’m a happy pappy. Other times I am a…
Once upon a time Brent was a high school bad boy, a teenaged hellraiser/ne’er do well with an insatiable hunger for fast cars and faster girls and a knack for getting into mischief.
Deep into middle-age, Brent pines longingly for the man he used to be. Mom and Dad is unrelenting in its intensity. It’s downright Crank and Crank: High Voltage-like in that respect.
But it slows way down at least once for a powerfully quiet scene where Brent and Kendall talk about all that they gave up when they decided to have children and the price that they’ve paid for domesticity and respectability. Cage has a lovely monologue about how they used to be Brent and Kendall, individuals with all of the promise and potential in the world before they traded that in to become mom and dad.
Whether he’s willing to acknowledge it or not, there is some part of Brent that bitterly resents his children because he holds them responsible for his lost youth and freedom when time is the real the culprit there.
Even before things go terribly, homicidally awry something is ineffably off with the family. Taylor teases the madness and murder to come by having Cage’s disgruntled dad express aggression towards his children that is then revealed to be the fake hostility of a corny dad.
Brent may secretly and not so secretly rue the day he chose to breed but he nevertheless leans into being a dorky dad. I dig Mom and Dad in part because it combines two of my favorite Cage archetypes: corny dad and violently insane homicidal maniac.
There are moments in every parent’s life when they feel like they could kill their children after they did something especially egregious. In Mom and Dad that desire becomes both literal and oddly universal.
Seemingly overnight all parents are consumed with an inexplicable but undeniable urge to murder their offspring that they all unfortunately act upon en masse. To paraphrase bit player Dr. Oz, the natural order has suddenly been reversed.
The instinct to protect and care for your child has been replaced by an even more ferocious need to murder sons and daughter.
Mom and Dad follows Kendall as she observes the filicidal madness first as an observer and then as an active participant.
In a nifty bit of dark comedy having a common goal brings Brent and Kendall together. Unfortunately for their rebellious daughter Carly (Anne Winters) and their son Joshua (Chucky’s Zack Arthur) that shared goal involves murdering their children.
Mom and Dad becomes a movie about survival. As the world devolves into madness and murder Carly and Joshua hide in the basement in a desperate attempt to not be slaughtered by mom and dad.
Unluckily for Brent and Kendall on this particular day of the damned Brent’s parents are scheduled to come over for a visit. In an absolutely brilliant piece of casting Lance Henriksen plays Brent’s hard-ass veteran father, who is filled with hatred, bile and contempt for the world even when seemingly the sum of humanity has gone mad and murderous.
Henriksen and his wife prove that when it comes to killing your offspring there’s no age limit. All of the older man’s incoherent rage towards his son and his life choices come spilling out as he joins the homicide party and tries to murder his boy.
The arrival of the Pumpkinhead star lends a shot of adrenaline to a film that’s already punishingly intense. His appearance amounts to little more than a cameo, however.
Mom and Dad ends abruptly in a manner that doesn’t really resolve anything. There’s certainly something to be said for leaving audiences wanting more but the movie should be twenty minutes longer and have a full third act, instead of half of one.
To its credit Taylor’s solo directorial debut retains the Neveldine/Taylor vibe. The dynamic duo’s visual style isn’t terribly dissimilar from that of Michael Bay. They both favor crazy angles, quick cuts and visceral impact over coherence.
The difference is that at their best Neveldine/Taylor are punchy, profane pulp poets while Bay, with the exception of Ambulance and The Rock, is just a commercial vulgarian.
Cages’ career is full of near misses and kick-ass movies he almost made. That includes Crank. It was apparently written with Johnny Knoxville in mind but Cage was apparently in the mix at one point as a potential star before Jason Statham took the role.
Statham is amazing in what I see as his defining role/film but Cage would have been even better. I suspect that Cage, having wonderful taste (he’s a Clifford super-fan, for example) regretted the decision because he went on to work with Neveldine/Taylor on Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, which is no masterpiece but a lot sillier and more fun than its reputation would suggest, and with Taylor separately here.
Mom and Dad didn’t set any box-office records but from the perspective of 2023 it seems like the auspicious beginning of an impressive comeback.
For me Cage’s return to awesomeness began with 2016’s terrific, insanely underrated The Trust but seemingly no one saw that and it does not have the cult it deserves. In the years following Mom and Dad Cage continued to make forgettable direct to streaming movies but he also lent his talent to such winners as Mandy, Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Color Out of Space, Pig, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and Dream Scenario.
Brian Taylor gave Cage a killer role, literally and figuratively, that brought him roaring back to life after an extended stint in the direct-to-streaming wilderness.
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