The Joyce Carol Oates Adaptation Vengeance: A Love Story Is Terrible In Pretty Much the Exact Same Way As All of Nicolas Cage's Vehicles from this Period in His Career
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
I am perpetually impressed by my podcast cohost Clint Worthington’s gift for choosing complementary movies for every episode of Travolta/Cage. That was MUCH more difficult in John Travolta and Nicolas Cage’s heydays, when they played all kinds of roles in all kinds of movies.
They even played angels in movies that were both commercially successful and largely forgotten. But at a certain point these titans of the silver screen pretty much played the same kind of role in movies similar to the point of being interchangeable.
Researching my article on John Travolta's poorly received 2016 vehicle I Am Wrath I was surprised but not shocked to discover that the film was at one point going to be made with Nicolas Cage in the lead and William Friedkin directing.
That iteration of the film fell apart and the film was eventually made with Cage’s costar in the lead and The Mask/Eraser director Chuck Russell in the director's chair.
I was not shocked by this information because Cage and Travolta had such similar careers at this point in the cruel, cruel teens that it makes sense that they'd pursue projects that weren’t just similar but identical.
It’s a good thing Cage didn’t star in I Am Wrath. Can you imagine how embarrassing it would be for an Oscar winner like him to star in a poorly received, critically maligned flop where he played a man of violence hell bent on revenge?
Instead of collaborating with the director of The Exorcist and The French Connection on a poorly received, critically maligned flop where he played a man of violence hell bent on revenge Cage ended up making movies like 2017’s Vengeance: A Love Story, which is, you guessed it, a poorly received, critically maligned flop where he plays a man of violence hell bent on revenge.
If Cage dodged a bullet by not starring in I Am Wrath he then lunged madly into a bullet called Vengeance: A Love Story, which is just like I Am Wrath but worse and infinitely more depressing.
In Vengeance: A Love Story Cage plays John Dromoor[. He’s a veteran police officer who has been sad since his wife died. At a bar one night gorgeous, ethereal single mother Teena Maguire (Anna Hutchinson) comes onto him shamelessly but he’s too committed to remaining despondent to reciprocate her romantic overtures.
The depressed cop with the vacant glare later finds the widow clinging to life after having been gang-raped by a quartet of cartoonish hillbillies out of a 1980s Cannon exploitation movie in front of her traumatized twelve year old daughter.
As in I Am Wrath the hero points out her attackers in a police line-up but learn the hard way that the justice system hates attractive white people with riveting personal stories of loss and horrific abuse and LOVES scuzzy criminals with tragic facial hair and even more unfortunate tattoos.
The quartet of Deliverance rejects luck out in securing the services of Jay Kirkpatrick (Don Johnson), a hotshot lawyer in thousand dollar suits with a honey dripping Southern drawl and all the bogus charm in the world.
If I might give Johnson some very faint praise, he’s easily the best thing about Vengeance: A Love Story. He's a monster but he's a monster with flash and charisma. He’s an eminently hiss-worthy villain because he knows that what he’s doing is wrong and that his clients are guilty but he doesn’t care as long as the checks clear.
Johnson’s oily legal eagle has the judge for the rape trail of the four men accused of attacking Teena in his stylish back pocket.
The worse judge in the world flies into a rage when Cage’s good cop uses incorrect grammar and Teena tries to wear sunglasses on the stand because her vision has been negatively affected by the brutal sexual assault she miraculously survived.
Yet he has no problem whatsoever to Jay Kilpatrick defaming her as a drunken, promiscuous sex worker who consented to having sex with all four men in exchange for money, then got angry and demanded more for her services, all in front of her traumatized child.
The cartoonishly evil hillbilly gang rapists might as well have neck tattoos reading “Guilty” and wear tee-shirts with "Ask Me About My Brutal Rape of Teena Maguire.” That's how guilty they seem because that's how guilty they are.
The judge doesn't care. The crowd in the courtroom behave more like the audience for The Jerry Springer Show. They hoot and holler and clap and taunt the victim and scream insults and slander.
Yet the judge presiding over the judge doesn’t do anything. They might be cretins clearly intimidating a traumatized woman and her traumatized daughter but as long as they don’t wear sunglasses there’s nothing he can do.
Cage's principled detective cannot let blatant evil go unpunished. He can’t let these hillbilly heavies hurt other people. So in an exceedingly predictable development he takes the law into his own hands.
If the justice system won’t punish the most guilty criminals in our nation's history then he will personally punish them with extreme prejudice.
First he kills one of the rapists outside of a bar claiming self-defense. He lures the other three into traps by promising to give them incriminating information about Anna and her past and then ambushes them.
Johnson fills the charisma vacuum left by an uncharacteristically grim and joyless Cage. Cage delivers a strangely solemn, gray solemn performance devoid of the energy, personality and eccentricity he generally brings to even his worst and cheapest movies.
Vengeance: A Love Story is based on the provocatively titled Joyce Carol Oates novel Rape: A Love Story. Vengeance: A Love Story is violent, lurid and intense in that inimitable Oates fashion but is wholly lacking in moral ambiguity.
Everyone is exactly what they seem to be here. The good guys are 100 percent good. The bad guys are one hundred percent bad. The vigilante murders are similarly one hundred percent justified and one hundred percent righteous.
Vengeance: A Love Story was written by John Mankiewicz of the Mankiewicz family. At the risk of being overly critical, I don’t think the screenplay his grandfather Herman Mankiewicz wrote (by himself, thank you very much) wrote for Citizen Kane.
It might seem harsh to compare a direct to video stinker like Vengeance: A Love Story to a movie acclaimed as one of the greatest of all time but I have gone back to thinking that every movie should be compared to Citizen Kane and found lacking.
Vengeance: A Love Story isn’t as good as Citizen Kane. Hell, it’s not even as good as I Am Wrath and that movie fucking blows.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Failure