Hoo Boy Is Nicolas Cage's Grim Rage a Stinker!
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
At a certain point Nicolas Cage stopped making movies for theaters and started cranking out product for RedBox. The budgets plummeted along with the ambition. Cage wasn’t trying to express himself through art or make a statement about how he saw the world and his place in it. He was just making money the only way he knew how: churning out bottom-feeding action movies.
The movies all began to blur together. The titles and premises might be different but they feel awfully similar. It felt like Cage was making the same terrible movie over and over again. Fans like myself became grateful for an outlier like Left Behind because it might have been low-budget garbage but at least its Christianity made it distinctive and set it apart from the rest of the dreck from this period.
There is nothing distinctive about 2014’s Rage, beginning with its brown paper bag of a title. It’s like every other action movie where someone hurts the protagonist and his family and he retaliates by murdering as many bad guys as possible.
Cage plays Paul Maguire, a man of violence who wracked up quite the body count as a uniquely bloodthirsty young hooligan before his wife died and he vowed to clean up his act and go straight.
Cage upon learning that Dilbert had been cancelled.
As the film opens, Paul has gone from one extreme to another. He’s stopped stabbing people with his beloved knives and turned into Ned Flanders. He’s a respectable businessman with connections to powerful people whose life revolves around being a doting dad to his beloved teenaged daughter Caitlin (Aubrey Peeples) and a loving husband to wife Vanessa (Rachel Nichols).
Nichols was in her thirties when she made Rage but she looked decades younger. She looks like she could be playing Cage’s daughter rather than his wife and, for me at least, her youth never stops being distracting.
Whenever Nichols is onscreen I found myself wondering why a grown man was married to a teenager when Nichols is actually a mere sixteen years younger than the actor playing her husband.
Cage’s proud papa is so wholesome that he has taken a strong, even strident stance against drinking, marijuana smoking, drug use, partying and other foolishness and monkeyshines, particularly where his daughter is concerned.
It’s all about being on the up and up and straight and narrow for this reformed criminal until his daughter goes missing and ends up dead with a bullet in her brain.
You know that meme of an uncharacteristically somber, gun-toting Bugs Bunny accompanied by the words “Lord Forgive Me But Its Time to Go Back to Tha Old Me?”
That’s Paul after what he loves most in the world is destroyed through violence. Paul stops being a corny, supportive dad and goes back to being a glowering, dead-eyed killing machine.
Paul’s hair gets messier and he instantly becomes mildly racist. Legitimate business takes a back seat to cold blooded revenge as he reconnects with his old team, a pair of hard-living bruisers who aren’t averse to killing and maiming if necessary, or possible.
Our increasingly psychotic hero figures that since he ripped off the Russian mob and used to work for the Irish mob both criminal associations might be in the market for bloody vengeance.
So Paul has his goons go around terrorizing people that they think might have information about his daughter’s murder. Detective Peter St. John (Danny Glover), a shamus who is clearly getting too old for this shit, advises Paul to let the cops do their jobs and not wage a three man war against organized crime but Paul instead chooses the unfortunate, brutally predictable path of revenge.
Frank’s former boss Frances "Frank" O’Connell (the perpetually paycheck-happy Peter Stormare, reuniting pointlessly and inevitably with Cage after 8MM and Windtalkers) similarly advises him to stand down but he isn’t about to be dissuaded by something as minor as the strong words of a ruthless criminal.
Frank mentions that he prefers the loving, personal intimacy of stabbing strangers in the heart over and over again until they’re a raging gusher of blood to the impersonal coldness of guns.
But we don’t get to see Frank lovingly plunge his knife into poorly differentiated bad guys until forty five minutes in. Rage offers no frills meat and potatoes action with a vaguely fascist bent.
Frank’s life has been utterly and incontrovertibly destroyed by an act of violence against someone he loves. Yet it doesn’t seem to occur to him or to the simple-minded movie that maybe other people’s lives are similarly being destroyed by the acts of violence he and his men are carrying out almost reflexively, with seemingly no forethought or remorse.
Rage can’t even bring itself to flat out state that gruesome, bloody-minded revenge is bad. The best it can muster is that revenge can be bad but also that it’s very important to kill all the bad guys before they can kill you or anyone else.
If you do not want Rage spoiled by my words and not by its own derivative awfulness stop reading now. It turns out the reason that Frank and his thugs aren’t getting any useful, legitimate information about Caitlin’s murder is because, in this matter at least, they are completely innocent.
Caitlin’s death was actually an accident. She was accidentally shot by a high school friend while having one of those fun little parties where everyone gets black out drunk and then points loaded guns at each other.
Cage’s stern dad was right in thinking that drinking, partying and fooling around lead to death and destruction. If Caitlin and her friends stayed away drugs, alcohol and partying, she’d be alive, as would twenty to thirty underground figures who ended up on the receiving end of Frank’s knives or his compatriots’ bullets.
Rage doesn’t even have the consolation of a good Cage performance. Cage is at his very worst in a performance that alternates between three unsatisfying modes. There’s Cage the corny dad at the beginning and only the beginning, followed by Cage the remorseless assassin and Cage the grief-stricken mourner who howls in despair and weeps uncontrollably at regular intervals in ways that are embarrassing rather than moving.
This joyless slog came out the same year as John Wick, another hyper-violent action movie about a man of violence who chooses peace and prosperity before reverting back to his old ways in a quest for vengeance. Keanu Reeves’ deeply satisfying cult classic makes Rage seem even sorrier by comparison.
This is a low. It’s a grim nadir with plenty to follow before Cage’s big comeback. Cage never stopped doing good work, as winners like Joe and Mom and Dad prove, but during the lean years he made movies this bad in unfortunate abundance.
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