Nicolas Cage's 2015 Political Drama The Runner Sucks in a Different Way Than Cage's Usual Fare But it Still Fucking Sucks
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
Nicolas Cage is so synonymous with forgettable, interchangeable action movies that it’s easy to forget that he did not begin making action movies of great quantity, if not quality, until fairly deep into his film career.
When Cage perversely and very unsuccessfully tried to channel Tom Cruise in the 1990 helicopter drama Firebirds the second rate action movie was an outlier in a filmography otherwise devoted to artsier, more ambitious and less formulaic fare.
Cage’s career as an action hero kicked into high gear with his iconic turn opposite Sean Connery in the Michael Bay 1996 masterpiece The Rock. Considering the beloved instant classic’s success it’s not surprising that it was followed by many more action movies of wildly varying degrees of quality and ambition.
Cage was a heavyweight thespian and an Academy-Award winning dramatic actor before he got into the action hero game. Cage could have gone his entire career without making action movies but that’s where the paychecks and the roles are so somewhere in the mid to late 1990s he became a gun-toting action star for better but mostly for worse.
By the time Cage one again disappointed a consistently underwhelmed moviegoing public with the 2015 political stinker The Runner he was so thoroughly typecast as a second rate RedBox action hero that it was jarring to see him to play anything but a good guy with a gun who gets vengeance on the bad guys or a bad guy with a gun hunting the heroes.
Like Left Behind, The Runner at least sucks in a decidedly different manner than most of his stinkers from this period. But it sucks all the same in a way that’s not even fun. Forget so bad it’s good: The Runner is so bad that it’s exhausting. It may be called The Runner but it limps mightily for 82 forgettable, regrettable, low-energy minutes.
In The Runner, Cage plays Colin Pryce, an ambitious, passionate if troubled Louisiana congressman whose career catches fire when he delivers what we are told repeatedly is a VERY powerful speech about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, one of the greatest and most damaging environmental disasters in American history.
At his peak Cage would be more than capable of pulling off a lengthy, involved, passionate speech in a single take. I just watched the X prequel Pearl over the weekend, which climaxes with Mia Goth delivering an absolutely stunning monologue about the devastation and horror of her uniquely cursed existence that lasts about seven minutes.
THAT is the kind of virtuoso performance that The Runner needs at its core. We need to see for ourselves just how masterful and hypnotic Cage’s slick-talking politician can be at his erudite best, not hear other character gush about it in glowing terms.
That’s not what we get. Instead we get an emotional but brief bit of hot-blooded rhetoric that’s seemingly over not long after it’s begun. Like everything else about the movie, it’s underwhelming and frustrating when it should be moving.
The heat from the politician’s speech gets folks talking about a Senatorial run until Colin’s seemingly limitless political future is compromised by the revelation that he has been carrying on an adulterous affair with the wife of a black fisherman.
The Runner doesn’t have anything of substance to say about race or class or gender or the complicated, fraught political landscape of Louisiana and New Orleans so the constantly referenced race and profession of the man whose wife Colin slept with is never anything more than a cynical, heavy-handed plot point.
Cage’s cagey politico’s career takes a potentially lethal hit thanks to his inability to control his raging libido. So he becomes a do-gooder doing pro bono work on behalf of people who have been fucked over by evil, giant corporations like BP.
Colin is an oily pragmatist in the John Edwards/Bill Clinton so it is unsurprising that he cheats on his Lady MacBeth-like wife Deborah (Connie Nielsen) with not only with the black fisherman’s wife but also with his staffer Kate (Sarah Paulson).
If Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip taught me anything, beyond satire being good and the Blacklist being bad, it’s that Sarah Paulson is the single most talented performer in the history of the universe.
She combines the comic chops of Gilda Radner with the dramatic gifts of Meryl Streep and the beauty and charm of Audrey Hepburn, or at least that’s what Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip drilled into my brain for twenty-two episodes.
Aaron Sorkin thought Paulson could play literally the greatest actress and comedienne of all time. He was wrong. No one could play a character that impossibly perfect, no matter how talented. And Sarah Paulson is VERY talented. She really is.
Paulson is a versatile and charismatic performer who has ZERO chemistry with Nicolas Cage. Seriously. You know how perfect Spenser Tracy and Katherine Hepburn were as a team? That’s how terrible Cage and Paulson are together here.
There’s no spark between Cage and Paulson. There’s no heat. There’s no connection. There’s just two profoundly miscast actors trying and failing to make something out of nothing.
Cage used to have explosive chemistry with seemingly all of his costars. City of Angels is far more convincing and engaging than it has any right to be because Cage makes you believe that his character is so obsessed with Meg Ryan’s doctor that he would literally give up heaven for a chance to be with her.
Yet Cage has no chemistry at all with the actress playing his wife or either of his two mistresses.
Speaking of fine performers utterly lost in this lukewarm mess of a melodrama, Peter Fonda does uncharacteristically subpar work in the ostensibly juicy supporting role of our anti-hero’s politician dad.
Like his son, he’s a charismatic, larger-than-life New Orleans character whose similarly promising career was cut short by alcoholism, unprofessionalism and an all-around air of moral decay.
Fonda and Cage should be a dynamic duo. It should be like Cage and Caine in The Weather Man: two giants of the silver screen perfectly cast as an intimidatingly accomplished dad and his callow son.
The difference is that in The Weather Man Cage and Caine had nuanced, multi-dimensional and richly observed characters to play as well as a terrific, fundamentally honest script. Here they’re reduced to playing vague ideas of interesting characters.
The Runner curdles into an underwhelming morality tale about a troubled but fundamentally decent politician who sells out his values and his integrity to a comically evil BP executive who stops just short of drinking blood from the skull of a dead baby to broadcast his monstrousness.
This is different from Cage’s usual movies during this era in that Cage doesn’t run around with a gun trying to get the bad guys but it has a lot in common with Cage’s other stinkers in that it makes terrible use of its New Orleans’ locations, bombed at the box-office, features an uncharacteristically bad, low-energy performance from Cage and, ultimately, fucking sucks.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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