Director Paul Schrader and Star Nicolas Cage Encouraged Audiences to Skip Their 2014 Thriller The Dying of the Light But They Didn't Need Any Help in Avoiding His Late-Period Stinkers
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When the 2014 Nicolas Cage vehicle The Dying of the Light was just barely released to withering reviews and non-existent box-office it was commonplace for critics to enthusiastically discourage audiences from seeing Cage’s new movies, though his reputation was so dire at the time that they did not need much convincing.
Moviegoers likewise encouraged other moviegoers to skip Cage’s newest offerings in favor of re-watching Moonstruck, Raising Arizona or Face/Off for a thirtieth or fortieth time.
What was unusual about The Dying of the Light was that Nicolas Cage himself told audiences not to see his latest movie despite it reuniting him with Paul Schrader, the legendary screenwriter of Bringing Out the Dead as well as Taxi Driver and Raging Bull.
Cage was not alone on that front. Schrader ALSO told audiences not to waste their time with his latest stinker, as did Cage’s costar Anton Yelchin and even Nicolas Winding-Refn, the film’s Executive Producer.
The stars, director and executive producer of The Dying of the Light went to the unusual extreme of disparaging their own movie because they felt, individually and collectively, that in its theatrical form, The Dying of the Light wasn’t really their movie at all.
They were understandably apoplectic that the film had ultimately been taken out of Schrader’s hands, re-edited and released in a version they did not support, condone or recognize as their own work.
This was not the first time this has happened to the prickly writer-turned-director. The producers of Schrader’s Exorcist prequel, for example, were so horrified by his work on 2005’s Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist that they brought in Renny Harlin to rework it to such an extent that it eventually became an entirely new film altogether, 2004’s Exorcist: The Beginning.
In a pointless coincidence, the Exorcist franchise is being resurrected once again with a forthcoming feature from David Gordon Green, the director of Joe, Cage’s best vehicle from this sorry era.
The Dying of the Light met the same sorry fate as seemingly all of Cage’s movies from this time but the disappointment had to be more intense and painful because on paper The Dying of the Light has so much more going for it than schlock like Left Behind and Rage that no one expected to be good, particularly people still following Cage’s career.
Like Cage’s similarly underwhelming vehicle The Runner, which Clint Worthington and I discussed on the latest episode of Travolta/Cage, The Dying of the Light opens with a speech from Cage’s Evan Lake that we are informed REPEATEDLY is so powerful and forceful and persuasive that it has attained legendary status.
Everywhere Evan goes, people gush about the riveting speech he delivers regularly but what we see of the monologue that made him a God in his agency feels like some warmed-over beatnik word salad nonsense.
It is sad if not terribly surprising that legends like Cage and Schrader couldn’t pull off a memorable, vigorously performed monologue at this stage of their careers. But there is a narrative reason that Cage’s character isn’t as sharp as he once was as well.
The veteran CIA agent is suffering from Frontotemporal dementia and his mind and his memory are both going. Evan is losing his ferocious focus yet he remains astute enough to deduce that his arch-enemy Muhammad Banir (Alexander Karim) did not die twenty-two years ago, as everyone assumed.
It turns out that Banir has a disease called Thalassemia that the CIA finds out about when he arranges to get an experimental cure through a middle-man.
The hero and villain are both desperately sick men staring mortality in the face from an uncomfortably close distance. The good guy and the bad guy being more alike than either would ever care to admit is of course a groaning thriller cliche that The Dying of the Light handles the way it does everything else: ineptly and with a hopelessly heavy hand.
Hokey themes don’t emerge organically from the material so much as the filmmakers sadistically beat audiences over the head with exhausted conventions for 94 energy-sucking minutes.
Cage’s CIA analyst in the shadowy twilight of his life and his career is never anywhere near as compelling, charismatic or complicated as he’s supposed to be. He feels less like a proper Paul Schrader anti-hero whose life and feverish imagination are monopolized by a singular obsession than a fuzzy Xerox of the kind of troubled men Schrader writes better and with more conviction than anyone else when he’s at his very best.
If Cage is a dim shadow of his former self playing a man who is a dim shadow of his former self he’s nevertheless a figure of Shakespearean depth and intrigue compared to his regrettably generic antagonist, who is never anything more than just another xenophobic caricature of a Muslim terrorist. .
It’s easy to see why Cage and Schrader were embarrassed by this mess. As with Schrader’s ill-fated Exorcist prequel it seems like the producers somehow imagined that the legendarily dark, brooding and troubled mind behind Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Taxi Driver, The Last Temptation of Christ and Affliction would deliver a solid commercial thriller with some artsy intensity thrown in for good measure.
That was never going to happen. Schrader only took over as director after its original director, Nicolas Winding-Refn, who was going to make the movie with Harrison Ford and Channing Tatum in the lead roles, bailed.
Winding-Refn left the project to direct Drive and Schrader assumed directorial duties. It’s tempting to imagine what might have been had the filmmakers been able to realize their original conception for the film, just as it’s seemingly impossible not to be disappointed with the mess we ended up with.
Being artists, Schrader and Cage clearly set out to make a thoughtful, cerebral exploration of obsession and mental deterioration that was transformed by money people into just another late-period Cage stinker where he carries a gun and hunts down the bad guys.
The Dying of the Light ended up satisfying no one, with the possible exception of undiscriminating RedBox consumers for whom any new Cage movie would do, no matter how monumentally underwhelming.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure
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