#66: Stolen (2012)

My name is Ed, and thank God there aren’t many of these films left so I can stop thinking of variations on this introduction. I watch a Nicolas Cage film, I play the lottery with numbers based on that film. Yes? Fine.

The opening of Stolen gave me a strong sense of deja vu: either I at some point watched it on Netflix while extremely drunk, or I’ve now watched so many god awful Nic Cage thrillers that my brain can procedurally generate the memories of having watched one without having to go the effort of actually sitting through it.

The other possibility is that Stolen is a film so bad and stupid the human memory won’t actually accept it. I can already feel my own mind struggling against the vast weight of suspension of disbelief this film unjustifiably demands. Perhaps in another week it’ll be totally gone, leaving space to remember something else. The taste of horse excrement, or the sound of my own screams during impromptu unanaesthetised surgery.

The central problem with Stolen is I don’t really know what it is, and I’m not sure the people who made it know either. It starts, if not exactly promisingly, at least vaguely engagingly, as a heist movie. Will (Nic Cage) and a band of crooks (played by actors who are in that tier of ‘definitely recognise them from somewhere but could not name them for a million quid’) steal a big load of cash, but because it’s the beginning of the movie, immediately fuck everything up. The police turn up, the others scarper leaving Will with a big bag of incriminating cash. One slightly pointless car chase later, Will has been arrested, and the money has mysteriously vanished.

Eight years later, Will gets out of prison only to find that Vincent, one of his criminal chums, has since gone round the bend, partly because he lost his leg after accidentally shooting himself with a gun during the heist, and all one-legged people are famously criminal lunatics. Vincent has kidnapped Will’s teenage daughter, and is holding her to ransom until Will gets him the cash from the bank heist.

If this movie was any good, it would immediately be revealed to the audience that Will isn’t hiding any money: instead he would have to do another heist in order to pay Vincent and save his daughter. In fact, this is actually what happens, but it only happens about 20 minutes before the end of the film after about an hour of Will, Vincent and some blokes from the FBI driving round New Orleans (why are so many bad Nic Cage movies set in New Orleans?) in circles trying to find each other and occasionally shouting. It’s like someone lost the only copy of the script a few weeks into production and they had to improvise until it turned up down the back of the sofa.

This sort of film is always going to have a lot of implausible bollocks in it: the problem with Stolen is that if you remove all that you don’t have anything else left. There aren’t really any characters to speak of, the performances (Cage’s included) are rote, there’s barely even a premise. Oh, and when they do finally get around to the second bank heist, it’s on the same bank from the start, which conveniently didn’t move anything or change any of their security measures at all in the eight years since they had 10 million dollars stolen.

Stolen was the second collaboration between Cage and director Simon West, who seems to have pretty much peaked with his (rather over-rated, see WTLWNC #30) directorial debut, Con Air. It contains one ‘hilarious’ joke about prison rape, and was a massive bomb at the box office.

I’ll give the final word to the ‘Talk’ section of the film’s Wikipedia page: ‘Why does such a crap film need such a big wikipedia article?’

THE NUMBERS

4 — The film opens with a man having a wee in the street, at 4am. It does not get substantially better than that!

8 — Will spends 8 years in jail for trying to escape the police: they couldn’t do him for the bank robbery because he burned the money in a bin before they got to him, which I’m sure is exactly how it works.

10 — The original heist is to steal $10 million in cash. Just play the lottery with numbers you’ve got from Nic Cage films, lads.

12 — The bad guy gives Will a 12-hour deadline if he ever wants to see his daughter again.

17 — Will escapes the FBI agents escorting him out of the FBI building by knocking them out, chaining them to the inside of the lift (because he’s somehow a fucking ninja as well as a bank robber) and sending it to floor 17.

23 — A fire engine turns up while they’re doing the final heist. It has a number 23 on the side. The number 23 is supposed to be all magic if you’re into all that Robert Anton Wilson stuff about taking LSD to access your Level 8 Consciousness or whatever, so maybe that’ll help.

THE RESULT

Not a single bloody match. (Not even on the Lucky Dip I won last time.) Stolen? More like robbed, mate. I say, more like r

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

The final animated Cage outing (at least for the time being): The Croods