If You Enjoy Movies Where Tough Guys Have Coke-Fueled Orgies with Sex Workers Then the 2019 Nicolas Cage/Laurence Fishburne Vehicle Running With the Devil is Right Up Your Alley!
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
The 2019 thriller Running With the Devil could very well be Nicolas Cage's most star-studded film in the past fifteen years, with the possible exception of The Retirement Plan. That’s not necessarily a good thing, considering that the film went direct to streaming.
When a movie starring Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne, Adam Goldberg, Cole Hauser, Barry Pepper, Leslie Bibb, Peter Facinelli, Natalia Reyes, and Clifton Collins Jr. skips the theaters entirely en route to Redbox, the thinking goes from “Is it good?” to “How bad can it possibly be?
I would not use words such as “good” to describe Running with the Devil. It’s not a great movie or even a particularly good one but the bar has been set so low for late-period direct-to-streaming Nicolas Cage movies that all it takes to clear it is being reasonably entertaining and mildly diverting.
“Reasonably entertaining” and “mildly diverting” are two phrases that describe Running with the Devil.
It’s a throwback to a subgenre I hated with a white hot burning passion at the time but now feel a distinct nostalgia for: Tarantino knockoffs.
Quentin Tarantino is indirectly responsible for a staggering array of bad movies. He is the illegitimate father to a wave of movies, released primarily in the mid to late 1990s, in which a galaxy of name actors working cheap in hope of being in the next Pulp Fiction wisecrack their way through bloody, darkly comic crime narratives rich in storytelling, macho attitude and tough guy posturing.
One of the cornerstones of Tarantino knockoffs is that they are so impossibly impressed with themselves that they don’t need the validation of audiences or critics. They’re all empty flash and style for the sake of style. Also, they’re boys' movies through and through. When I say boys, I mean boys. There’s an adolescent brattiness to the whole shebang that reeks of suspended development.
Running With the Devil isn’t one of those lame normie movies where the characters all have boring, conventional names like Irving, Marv, and Luanne. These crazy motherfuckers don’t even have names. Instead, they have existential identities rooted in the part they play in the wonderful world of illegal drugs.
Nicolas Cage IS “The Cook.” Laurence Fishburne is “The Man.” Leslie Bibb is “Agent in Charge.” Adam Goldberg is “The Snitch.” Barry Pepper is “The Boss”, which is a mighty grandiose title for a puny man-animal so stupid and primitive that he thinks he can gain leverage over a Psychlo. Adam Goldberg is “The Snitch.” Cole Hauser is “The Executioner.” Jerry Mathers is “The Beaver.” Clifton Collins Jr. is “The Farmer.” More pertinently Collins Jr. is also “The Guy Who is In the Movie for About Five Minutes.”
So if you fucking love Clifton Collins Jr. and inexplicably hate all the other famous actors in the movie, you’re out of luck because the character actor is barely in Running with the Devil. That’s another unexpected disadvantage of having so many big-name actors in the cast. There’s simply not enough for everyone to do so fine actors like Collins Jr. end up getting short-served.
To really drive home that these are all these badass motherfuckers played by your favorite actors they’re introduced with a graphic revealing their professions. How badass is that? Not very badass at all but the film seems to feel strongly otherwise.
Running With the Devil follows the money and, consequently, the action when a bad batch of cocaine cut with something dangerous and unknown begins causing overdoses and, consequently, problems.
The Man dispatches The Cook to try to figure out the cause of the problem. As in The Trust, which is possibly the single most underrated and overlooked movie in Cage’s filmography, Cage brings a real Ned Flanders energy to the role.
If they were to ever make a live-action movie out of The Simpsons, which a terrible, terrible idea, I would cast Cage as Ned Flanders. It’s an unusual and unexpected choice but he clearly feels some affinity for the character and really loves playing dorks.
The Cook is a bit of a geek. He looks like he could be a middle manager at Staples or Home Depot and carries himself with a sense of bourgeoisie respectability worth of Gus Fring.
This makes him much different from The Man. A lifetime ago, Fishburne and Cage starred in Rumble Fish and The Cotton Club for Cage’s Uncle Francis (who is also involved in the motion picture business) when they were young, hungry, and raw. They reconnect here when they’re both old, well-fed, and content.
Cage is a lot of fun here but the flashier role belongs to Fishburne, who feasts hungrily on a part that’s not exactly “good” but is an absolute blast. Even in the criminal underworld, he stands out for being particularly hedonistic and depraved.
The Man takes center stage in one of several montage sequences devoted to criminals getting it on with sex workers while doing cocaine. Running With the Devil does not have a big imagination and consequently cannot think of anything more transgressive than doing blow and then exchanging cash for sex.
Running with the Devil is so enamored of the cliché hedonism of cocaine and sex for pay that it introduces a diminutive redneck hood solely for the sake of showing him use drugs and then hire a prostitute for the film’s cornball conception of criminal depravity.
There’s no point in being subtle or understated when you’re playing The Man in a movie where you have sex with multiple women while high on cocaine. Fishburne doesn’t even try to play a human being. Instead he goes big and bold and over the top.
The surface pleasures of Running With the Devil, a movie that is all flashy surfaces, come largely from watching Cage and Fishburne, two old pros who know exactly what they’re doing, interact. They’re much better than the film or the material deserves but they also elevate the movie with their movie star charisma.
Goldberg has a juicy supporting role as a drug-addicted informer with a weakness for the old cocaine-and-sex-work combination but the movie belongs to Fishburne and Cage and their yin-yang chemistry.
Running with the Devil benefits tremendously from the low standards and low expectations of Cage’s vehicles from this period. It’s not good but it is exceedingly watchable. So if your expectations are low enough, you might just have fun with this impressively stupid motion picture. Cage and Fishburne certainly did!
Did you enjoy this article? Then consider becoming a patron here
AND you can buy my books, signed, from me, at the site’s shop here