Dog Eat Dog (November 4, 2016)

The most impressive thing about Dog Eat Dog is that it’s not even the worst Nicolas Cage movie of 2016 and it's absolutely god-awful. The only thing it has going for it is how unabashedly god-awful it truly is. It's Wiseau-level bad, the kind of bad you watch in awe and try to fathom how the decisions were made that led to this being something that could exist. The “plot” is simple: Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe, and some third guy — a dime-store Michael Chiklis — are three ex-cons with plans to do one last big score. It involves kidnapping a baby to hold it for ransom, and, of course, some things go awry, but I’m not going to spend any more time thinking about this film’s plot more than the film does.

Dog Eat Dog is a hodgepodge of random visual choices and a narrative that isn’t even cohesive enough to be considered episodic. After kidnapping the baby, the baby is literally gone from the film and never addressed again. One scene after the film’s title sequence is in black and white, and then we return to color like nothing ever happened. In the film’s final act, it decides action sequences will be in slow-motion. Characters are in near fatal predicaments and then we cut to black and they are out of those predicaments with no explanation at all. According to IMDb, Dog Eat Dog was staffed almost entirely by people straight out of film school, which is incredibly unsurprising because it’s amateurish to an almost aggressive degree. Yet, it was written and directed by Paul Schrader, who wrote fucking Taxi Driver so that doesn’t provide any excuse.

Nicolas Cage is about as restrained as the film. Falling hard on the exaggerated and aggressively strange side of the Cage-Spectrum. His character continuously screams line readings that don’t necessarily warrant it. He frequently cites himself as being Bogart-esque, and as the film ticks on, slowly devolves more and more into a flat-out Humphrey Bogart impersonation, a decision that was apparently, solely, Nic Cage’s and Schrader just let it happen. It’s an absolute mess, yet albeit fascinating in its own way, but there’s no real, compelling reason to watch it aside from morbid curiosity. All the parts where Cage unabashedly loses it will end up in YouTube compilations soon, anyways.

Looking back at 2016, and Nicolas Cage’s prodigious output, something starts to stick out like a sore thumb. For each film’s qualities, its strengths and weaknesses, Cage puts out an equal performance to that film. The lethargic, uninterested approach to its own subject matter of U.S.S Indianapolis is equivalent to Cage’s portrayal of Captain McVay. The unrestrained excessiveness of Dog Eat Dog, as a whole, is rivaled only by the exact same coming from its star. The Trust is odd, but overall pretty good, and the exact same could be said for Cage in the film. There’s an ability for him to always fit the film he’s in, and the question then becomes: is this a conscious decision on his part? Is this the special technique he uses to approach acting and, subsequently, why there’s nobody quite like him? He’s an unquestionably talented and capable actor, but perhaps his greatest skill is always knowing exactly what kind of film he’s in, and being able to go all in on whatever is necessary to make his performance match the subject matter. He’s an enigmatic talent, and we’ll see where he goes in 2017.