My name is Ed, and I am trapped in either heaven or hell, depending on your perspective: because I must watch every film Nicolas Cage has ever made. I must do this because it will help me to pick the winning numbers in the National Lottery, for important if dimly remembered reasons.

After a fairly bleak post-Bad Lieutenant run I needed Drive Angry, a film which posits that a) there is a hell, b) there are cars in hell and c) if you can drive one of the cars in hell fast enough you will escape back to the land of the living. Which of course Nicolas Cage, with one of the all-time great ‘on those nose but only if you squint and don’t think about it for more than six seconds’ character names of John Milton, does, in the first three minutes of Drive Angry. We never find out if escaping from hell causes you to have an astonishingly awful bleach blond haircut or if that’s a ‘character choice’.

Once back on Earth, Milton quickly acquires a sidekick, Piper (Amber Heard), a diner waitress who’s on the run from an abusive boyfriend. Bit of breath holding here as you pray that Heard, 22 years Cage’s junior, is not going to turn out to be the love interest: she doesn’t, and at least gets more to do than the standard ‘looking worried’ and ‘kissing’. I mean, she ends becoming a substitute daughter figure and I don’t think it even passes the Bechdel test on a technicality, but just in case you were worried, no, they don’t make out.

That’s not to say you’re not going to watch Nicolas Cage have full sex with a lady, while clutching a bottle of whiskey and and smoking a cigar. When his naked partner, Candy, a more age appropriate waitress, queries that he hasn’t removed any of his clothes, Milton replies that he never disrobes “before gunplay”. He then proceeds to have a gun battle, killing about 12 people, without ever dropping the whiskey, the cigar, or the lady.

(The lady in question is later found at the scene, hiding in a cupboard, traumatised and crying, which sort of a weirdly naturalistic turn for a film about a man driving a car out of hell.)

I know technically just describing some things that happened in a thing isn’t a review but a) this is the internet where just describing some things that happened in a thing is in fact counted as a review (and if you say them in a wry way you’re an internet pro and get a certificate) and b) it’s kind of the only way to give a flavour of how utterly ludicrous this film is.

Drive Angry is in some ways, Ghost Rider made right: both feature damned soul fighting demons with motor vehicles, but this actually manages a true comic book sensibility, with the correct level of disregard for reality. Two stoners come across the car wreck that’s temporarily trapping ‘The Accountant’, the smartly dressed demon come to return Milton to hell (an excellent turn from William Fichtner): immediately the car door comes flying off hitting one of them full on and sending him flying through the air. There might as well be a ‘POW!’ caption. By the end of the film Nicolas Cage is drinking beer out of a man’s skull, and it seems ENTIRELY REASONABLE. Not a smart film per se, just smart enough to know exactly how to deliver stupidity, i.e. quickly, and with style.

THE NUMBERS

3 — Drive Angry was originally released in 3D: I saw it that version in the cinema, and while, for the most part, the 3D effect was as forgettable as it generally is, one thing has stuck with me. A couple of times the film uses an interesting ‘flashback’ technique — the ‘past’ shown as a layer over the ‘present’ — and my memory tells me that in the 3D version it was literally floated over the top. Maybe I’ve got that wrong, but I can’t afford to buy a 3D TV to check: or can I? Let’s pick 5 more numbers and find out!

4 — Piper’s car has a ‘I brake 4 pussy’ sticker on it, courtesy of her boyfriend.

8 — Google Maps says the final showdown is an 8 hour drive from Milton’s mate’s place. Always disappointing when Bing hasn’t shelled out for same lame product placement.

13 — Milton’s granddaughter was stolen from an apartment number 13. Don’t live in an apartment 13 you idiots. What do you think’s gonna happen? A satanic cult is NOT gonna murder you and steal your kid?

34 — The apartment Piper shares with her domestically abusive boyfriend is number 34. This subplot is unfortunately a little on the nose these days. Fuck all those old ‘actually he’s my best mate and I guarantee he never hits ladies’ wanks, eh?

51 — According to Milton’s driving license, he was born in 1951. Even discounting that he presumably didn’t age for the 10 years he was in hell, this means that Cage is actually playing slightly older than his real age (he would have been 46 at the time). Hard not to snigger when he’s described as looking ‘about 40’, though.

THE RESULT

One number. I wonder if films that mess with satanic forces are better or worse luck than films where Nic Cage plays an angel or whatever.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Cage reunites with Joel Schumacher for the more-or-less straight to DVD ‘classic’, Trespass.

My name is Ed and my self-inflicted curse is to watch every Nicolas Cage film until I have won the National Lottery (using numbers based on each film), or have run out of Nicolas Cage films, or have bludgeoned myself to death in a fit of despair.

“Do you have any regrets, grampa Ed?” asks my space grandchild as I lie dying from a space disease, incurable even with all the medical resources my huge Nicolas Cage film-watching derived fortune can buy. I look into all 3 of her space eyes, and whisper: “Season of the Witch”.

There have always been bad Nicolas Cage movies: the list of what I’ve got left to watch includes several that only avoided the ‘straight-to-DVD’ label on a technicality by being shown once in a cinema in Idaho or something. But it’s not the bad ones that get you, it’s the boring ones.

There really is barely anything to say about Season of the Witch, because barely anything happens in it. Interminably. Nic Cage and Ron Perlman fight in the Crusades until they suddenly realise that they’ve just spent the last ten years butchering women and children for no particularly good reason and fuck off. Then Christopher Lee (near unrecognisable under prosthetic plague buboes and a questionable accent) tells them he’ll dob them in if they don’t take a witch to a monastery. So they do that and some other people including that young Irish lad from off of Misfits come with them because that’s what it says in the script.

Something was clearly very wrong with the production of this movie — reshoots were done without the involvement of the original director (Dominic Sena, of Gone in 60 Seconds ‘fame’). Instead King Mediocrity Brett Ratner stepped in to wave people around in front of green screens in a desperate, failed, attempt to make this watchable. Fun fact: Brett Ratner once published his own magazine called RATMAG. “What makes Brett Ratner tick? Pick up RATMAG and find out.”

But the real giveaway that something was very severely up is the accents. The film is set in Eastern Europe: the standard approach would be to get everyone to do that sort-of British accent that indicates that something generically historical is happening. Instead the actors appear to have been allowed to do whatever the hell they felt like that day. Cage could, somewhat generously, be said to be mid-Atlantic, Perlman is perhaps floating a few miles off the coast. Meanwhile, actually British actors Claire Foy, Stephen Graham and Christopher Lee have each decided to affect a different American accent. One can only assume that they were under orders to try and follow the lead of whatever the hell Cage was attempting to do.

Anyway, off they go across the country with a witch in a box, getting into largely dismal scrapes including an obligatory sequence where they have to push the lady in the box over a rickety bridge. Why is there alway a rickety bridge in this kind of film? Who made them, and why don’t they look after them properly? You lads need to sort out your infrastructure. But at least something happens in the bridge scene: the film’s big mistake is to keep flashy, expensive action sequences sparse and hope that it can wing it on a spooky atmosphere. And while the Eastern European location footage looks alright, the performances are more Monty Python and the Holy Grail than The Seventh Seal.

Actually, that’s a really unfair thing to say. I shouldn’t airily dismiss Monty Python and the Holy Grail like that, comedy’s difficult. And the closest this gets to being watchable is a few almost passable bits of business between Cage and Perlman, e.g. “I’ve seen girls destroy men without lifting a finger.” “How many times do we have to go over this? It was in FRANCE!” But the actors seem so disinterested in it that in that it isn’t a hope — both comedy and horror are rendered into dreary grey soup.

The Hound from Game Of Thrones is in it very briefly if you’re trying to watch all the stuff with The Hound from Game Of Thrones in it. It’s one of 301 films listed on IMDB as containing substantial amounts of Latin dialogue. I like toasted cheese sandwiches. Did they really have dudes wandering around battlefields shouting about the glory of God during the middle of the brutal fighting? Seems a bit impractical. Put a spoonful of baked beans inside a toasted cheese sandwich for a fun bean surprise.

There isn’t even a witch in this film, as it turns out. It was a computer-animated demon all along! If you’ve been affected by a computer animated demon, the Kilroy team would like to hear from y

THE NUMBERS

3 — The plague brought by the witch has been on the land for ‘three years and a season’.

6 — The monastery that they need to get to for whatever reason is 6 days travel from wherever they start from is. Sure.

10 — Ron Perlman signed up to fight for the Crusades for 10 years because he wanted God to forgive him for banging too many ladies. That is a real background detail in this film.

32 — We first see Nic Cage and Ron Perlman fighting a Crusade at the Gulf of Edremit in 1332. Apparently this is historically inaccurate — the closest real battle was in 1334, was naval and wasn’t really a crusade. Somewhere on this long internet web page is someone getting very mad about how just dubious the history behind this film is.

40 — The monastery that they need to get to for whatever reason is 400 leagues from wherever they start from is. Fine. Actually, it’s not fine. 400 leagues is about 1,400 miles. That’s about 230 miles a day. By horse. Pulling a lady in a box. Nah, mate.

44 — The bulk of the ‘action’ takes place in 1344. You can tell I’m not really overthinking these, can’t you? 1344 was a leap year.

THE RESULT

Sorry space grandchild, I guess my unborn space family will have to live in the space bin because I have still not won the stupid lottery.

Oh well. At least I still have my pride.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Drive

Angry

3D

(Except not in 3D because I’m not a 3D TV owning millionaire. Yet.)

My name is Ed and I play the National Lottery because I believe I know how to win it: watch a Nicolas Cage film, pick 6 numbers from within or without that film, and buy a lottery ticket with those numbers.

The thing you learn about Nicolas Cage films when you’ve watched about sixty Nicolas Cage films is that you can’t really predict anything based on prior efforts: Nic Cage films shot in New Orleans are all terrible, until Bad Lieutenant, Nic Cage action movies are brilliant, apart from all the really shit ones, Nic Cage films directed by Jon Turteltaub are great campy romps, until The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which is a massive load of old cack.

The film apparently came about purely on the whim of Cage, who decided one day that he’d love to play an ‘ancient sorcerer’. Instead of everyone going ‘That’s nice Nic!’ and moving on quickly, somehow this developed into an actual film, borrowing the title of that bit in Fantasia with Mickey Mouse and the mops. I say ‘developed’, but I suspect the script took slightly less long to write that the film does to watch.

In brief: once upon a time in the olden days some sorcerers did a big fight and Merlin died but the good sorcerer Nic Cage put the bad sorcerers inside a sort of magic Russian doll thing. Cut to modern day New York and the bad sorcerers escape and everyone does another big fight. Also, the sorcerer Nicolas Cage has to train a physicist who’s a sort of pound shop Zach Braff to be the reincarnation of Merlin? Or something? Everyone keeps saying stuff like ‘Prime Merlinean’ and ‘Grimhold’ like they mean it. I don’t know.

It should be said that one thing the film does have it going for it is some fairly inventive special effects: particularly memorable is a Chinese dragon being magically turned into a real dragon, which we also see from the perspective of the horrified people trapped inside. There’s some real attention to detail, careful use of practical effects, and a sense of what’s actually spectacular as opposed to ‘fling a much computer generated shit at the screen as possible’.

But what a colossal waste of everyone’s time that is when the script’s so miserably half-hearted. Hey, I know it’s only a dumb fantasy movie and Nic Cage is probably going to make up his own dialogue on the set regardless, but come on, man. Give me some stakes, make me care about stuff. Don’t just write the word Merlin loads as though I’m going to be impressed by that.

Cage is supposed to be a 1000-year-old sorcerer but a lot of the film would play exactly the same if he was just a delusional tramp. This isn’t a problem per se: his delivery of the line ‘unless you want him to turn you into a pig who just loooooves physics’ is a bit of properly canonical Cage. It’s just that there’s so little for him to work with (or against) — it’s not so much a character as a blank space with PERFORMANCE GOES HERE???

Chief bad guy Alfred Molina might as well be asleep: his henchman is a good idea not properly developed — a celebrity illusionist who can also do real magic. Monica Bellucci is also in this film? And she’s possessed by the Borg Queen from Star Trek? But there’s just so little for anyone to do, other than exposit and wave their hands in a ‘magical’ fashion.

The problem is sort of summed up by a scene which vaguely attempts to justify the borrowed title: Dave the Sorcerer’s Apprentice needs to clean up his lab so decides to save time using his new magical abilities. You will never guess. You will absolutely never guess. You will absolutely never guess what happens when he casts a spell on a mop. Which, you know, fine — but it’s all rather clumsy, drawing you out of the film for no particularly good reason beyond ‘Do you remember this? Do you remember when Mickey did this?’ At a certain point you’re not really making a film so much as just pointing a camera at a bunch of stuff.

It’s a shame really: it’s not like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice could ever have been anything other than a load of old nonsense, but with a more coherent script (well, let’s be charitable — I suppose it’s possible the editing ruined it) it could have at least been a fun load of old nonsense. Why didn’t Nic Cage and Jon Turteltaub just make National Treasure 3, the idiots.

THE NUMBERS

3 — The opening monologue informs us that Merlin entrusted his secrets to his three apprentices, one of whom turned out to be a right rotter let me tell you! For some reason this narration is done by Lovejoy, even though this film doesn’t have Lovejoy in it. Maybe he is in it but only secretly due to invisible magic.

7 — Nicolas Cage is a sorcerer of the 777th degree. What does that mean? Who ranks sorcerers? Is there a committee?

10 — In the opening section of the film, the sorcerer Nicolas Cage is trapped inside a magic urn for 10 years. For important plot reasons like ‘Uh?’ and ‘I guess?’

20 —By the time the sorcerer Nicolas Cage gets out of the urn, Dave, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, has just turned 20.

25 — Dave’s special physics lab for impressing girls with musical lightning is at 225 Washington Place.

35 —The sorcerer Nicolas Cage has a magic car that sometimes looks like a 1935 Rolls Royce Phantom. This is one of Nicolas Cage’s actual real-life cars, unless he’s had to sell it after forgetting to pay tax again or whatever.

THE RESULT

And as if by magic: no numbers.

There are four credited writers on this, and I hope they all get someone else’s gob in their tea.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Season of the Witch

My name is Ed, and my superpower is that I can watch a Nicolas Cage movie, use it to pick six numbers, and enter the UK National Lottery. You may say that anyone can do this, and so it is not a superpower. But if that’s true, why am I the only person who does do it?

I’d say that there’s nothing wrong with the basic premise of Kick-Ass: what if a guy without superpowers or special abilities of any kind decided to put on a costume a fight crime? I’d say that if there hadn’t been another film released in 2010 — ‘Super’ — with exactly the same premise, that’s also a pile of crap.

The problem is that the premise really only suggests one joke: someone dressed in a superhero costume is on the receiving or giving end of some ‘realistic’ violence. After that you’ve got to move on and do something else, and what Kick-Ass chooses to do is to tell a fairly straightforward superhero origin story.

And it has a few nice ideas about how to do that: our hero Dave/Kick-Ass unintentionally gains a minor ‘superpower’ in that the injuries sustained during his first attempt at heroism leave him full of metal plates and unable to feel pain; Kick-Ass’s real power being the cult following he gains on MySpace (although, MySpace: in 2010?).

Yer man Nicolas Cage turns up as Big Daddy, an ex-cop turned vigilante who wears an ersatz Batman costume and whose sidekick Hit Girl is his 11-year-old daughter. Cage claims to have been referencing Adam West’s campy performance in the ’60s TV Batman — maybe here and there, but at heart the character is a sort of keen sub-urban sport dad who just happens to be coaching their kid in the sport of ‘revenge killing’. His non-eyelid batting chipperness almost steals the movie, but tiny Chloë Grace Moretz is an impressive foil and more than holds her own against him.

But. But. Kick-Ass is extraordinarily pleased with itself, constantly winking at the audience, so busy passing notes saying ‘look how subversive!’ that it fails to notice that it’s actually telling a fairly straightforward story. Listen, did you hear the 11-year-old say the C word? Did you see how many killings just happened? Are you offended? Am I offending you now?

Worse still is the streak of casual homophobia, particularly evident in a sub-plot in which Dave’s attempts to cover up his superheroic activities result in everyone assuming he’s gay, which is the subject of much ‘hilarity’, because can you even imagine? It’s okay though, because he uses the fact that everyone thinks he’s gay to touch a pretty lady without her knowing that it’s turning him on. Big LOLs!

Putting this stuff in your film isn’t subversive, it’s just being an arsehole. Any bright moments in Kick-Ass are drowned out by the feeling that the main intended audience is anyone who’ll whoop at yet more unpleasantly ‘real’ violence and/or someone being called a fag.

Still, there’s a scene where Nicolas Cage kills Dexter Fletcher in a car crushing machine, which has got to be useful trivia for someone one day.

THE NUMBERS

3 — At one point we see a cinema advertising a screening of The Spirit 3. This is presumably a (mean-spirited, LOL?) joke about The Spirit, a Frank Miller-helmed superhero movie that bombed so bad basically everyone has forgotten it even existed.

7 — A handgun bullet travels at more than 7 hundred miles per hour. Big Daddy demonstrates this by shooting Hit Girl in the chest. It’s okay, it’s just a training exercise, and she’s wearing a bullet proof vest! Also it’s just a film, so it’s only pretend.

11 — Hit Girl is 11-years-old. Or at least the actress who played her was at the time the film was made. It says here.

14 — Big Daddy and Hit Girl live in an apartment numbered 14.

16 — Dave’s MySpace has 38 friends. Kick-Ass’s MySpace: 16,000 and counting. Was anyone even still using MySpace in 2010? I did survey on Twitter and no-one was, so there. Wait, was this deeply misguided product placement?

30 — Apparently you can microwave someone to death in 30 seconds. If you have a microwave big enough to put a human in. The bloke they microwave to death looks a bit like Rory from Doctor Who. But it isn’t him. I checked. It’s just some bloke.

THE RESULT

0 numbers. It’s official: don’t become a vigilante.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which is literally based on that bit of Fantasia. Because???

My name is Ed, and I am attempting to learn the fundamental truth behind everything by watching every Nicolas Cage film in order. At the very least, I intend to win the UK National Lottery by entering using a set of numbers based on each and every film.

New Orleans has not had that great a time of it over the last couple of decades. For a start, it was the location of at least two deeply terrible films: Zandalee, an erotic thriller in which Nicolas Cage ends up covering himself in paint after accidentally cuckolding Judge Reinhold to death, and also Sonny, a Nicolas Cage’s aimlessly depressing directorial debut in which James Franco plays a gigolo pimped out by his own mother.

If that wasn’t bad enough, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina attempted to wipe it off the face of the planet. And before it could even properly recover from that, Nic Cage turned up again, this time with Werner Herzog, for The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

If you’ve never encountered Herzog: he made a film about a lunatic making people drag a huge ship over a mountain, by making people drag a huge ship over a mountain. He walked from Munich to Paris in the middle of a snowstorm as a ritual act to cure a friend’s illness. He once literally ate a shoe because he lost a bet. Why not do a Herzog impression by affecting a German growl and saying “But life, is it not also death?”

Herzog and Cage were in town to, ostensibly, remake Abel Ferrera’s 1992 film, Bad Lieutenant. I’ve never seen the original — but then neither has Herzog, who insists that it isn’t a remake, but a slightly similar film marketed by the studio under the same ‘brand’. For his part, Abel Ferrera says that he wishes everyone involved in the second film would die in explosive car accident (no, really).

Port of Call New Orleans is police procedural as ludicrously dark farce. Cage is the Bad Lieutenant, McDonagh, assigned to investigate the gang-related murder of five illegal immigrants. But at the same time he’s trying to juggle his constant, vast (and varied) drug intake, vanishing witnesses, spiralling gambling debts, his sex worker girlfriend (Eva Mendes here redeeming herself for the abysmal Ghost Rider), and the occasional hallucinatory iguana.

Cage is a shambling, bellowing agent of chaos, visibly wracked with physical and mental pain. Not only is he heavily addicted to painkillers (after suffering a back injury during a brief moment of bravery during Katrina), but every problem he solves seems to cause three more. During the course of his ‘investigation’, we see him arresting kids just to steal their drugs, trying to fix football games to pay his gambling debts, even suffocating a rich old woman who he thinks has impeded his investigation (he relents, before screaming that she’s ‘the fucking reason this country’s going down the drain’).

At one point we find ourselves at lizard’s eye view, following the crawling animal edging around a crime scene, as though Herzog has finally become so disgusted with humans that he can barely stand to be one. The film is an intensely odd experience, a horribly cynical, relentlessly, supernaturally, and laughably unpleasant. But there’s something mesmerising about it: a demented beauty that rises out of all the Herzogian chaos. I give it 5 out of 5 boats pulled over mountains.

THE NUMBERS

5 — The case McDonagh is trying to solve for most of the movie is the murder of 5 illegal immigrants from Senegal. Can you count to 5?
15 — Daryl, a young witness to the crime, asks if he can be on the stand before May 15th, because that’s when his mother goes before the parole board.
23 — McDonagh’s vicodin prescription costs 23 dollars with his copay, which is something to do with America’s broken healthcare system, right readers?
24 — The opening scene with the jail cells flooded with dirty water involved using 2,400 bags of coffee to get the water the right colour. They started with regular coffee but the actor playing the prisoner was absorbing it through his skin (and presumably getting too wired even for a Herzog movie).
25 —McDonagh attempts to pressure the footballer Renaldo Hayes into throwing a game so that he can win a bet. Hayes fakes an injury to avoid doing this, but we see him on the sideline, wearing shirt number 25. It’s American football, so it’s all a load of rubbish anyway, right readers?
55 — In the opening McDonagh is reticent about saving a prisoner from a flooding cell because he’s wearing underwear that cost 55 dollars. It’s made from Swiss cotton, apparently. Right readers?

THE RESULT

1 number. More like fucking shit lieutenant.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Another near miss for Cage at ‘playing a proper superhero’, in Kick-Ass.

My name is Ed and I going to win the lottery by watching films with Nicolas Cage in them. I am. I just am, alright?

After G-Force, Astro Boy makes two animated versions of Nicolas Cage in one week! And this time he’s playing a human man instead of a mole — the father of fun future science teen Toby Tenma, who is gosh-gee-shucks going to have some fun in the floating sci-fi city he calls home. That is, until he is vaporised by a death machine about fifteen minutes into the film for children.

Astro Boy is based on a Japanese comic from the ’50s which apparently followed the same basic premise (although the fatal incident was a car crash): the grief-stricken father builds a super-powered robotic version of his son, then rejects him for not actually being his son. This is basically Pinocchio retold by Black Mirror and as such is kind of awful and upsetting?

But when rejected Astro Boy finds himself binned off in the robot graveyard that lies underneath the sky city, the film suddenly becomes a genuinely funny comedy. The highlight is Astro’s encounter with the Robot Revolutionary Front, a gang of robots and a fridge determined to free their enslaved electronic brothers but unable to take any action due to the Asimov-style laws of robotics imprinted on their brains: they have to resort to threatening to tickle people. There’s a lot of nice business here, ably voiced by Matt Lucas and Bill Nighy (not doing an awful Australian accent, praise be) with director David Bowers as the fridge.

(Fans of arbitrary biographical information may wish to note that David Bowers started his career animating episodes of Dangermouse and Count Duckula — he also worked on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. What I’m saying is: I’ve learned these things on Wikipedia and I am going to show off as though that is in any way impressive.)

This whole middle section, which sees Astro join a scavenging gang of kids led by robot repairman Hamegg, feels like it’s from a completely different, punched up, version of the script. But like all good and nice things, this cannot last. The final act is mostly dreary fights with robots and vaguely insulting plot logic about magical blue things and magical red things.

A serious Cageologist might wish to compare and contrast his roles in this and the previous entry’s subject, G-Force. While, in theory, grieving father Dr Tenma might seem to be a slightly meatier part than a comedically murderous mole, in practice Cage does a lot less here — possibly because the role is too straightforward, too defined on the page — whereas in G-Force someone’s clearly just told him to go for it. What I’m saying is that those snobs at the Academy need to have a word with themselves: Speckles the mole should have won Cage his second Oscar.

THE NUMBERS

3 — When the robot revolutionaries are called ‘to arms’, one of them objects that he has three arms.
10 — Astro is warned that you need ten sets of eyes in Hamegg’s den.
13 — Murdered child Toby was 13 years old.
24 — Hamegg’s robot repair service is open 24 hours a day, according to a poster.
45 — When Astro Boy first discover he can fly he gets caught by a speed camera, at Mile Post 45, according to the photo.
52 — The original Astro Boy comic was published in 1952. Heard your boyfriend’s annoyed that I’m not calling it a manga.

THE RESULT

0 numbers. I take it back, I am glad that kid died.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

The Bad Lieutenant

(Port Of Call New Orleans)

My name is Ed and I live in a formless void surrounded by Nicolas Cage films and lottery tickets. One day I will pick 6 numbers from a Nicolas Cage film use them to buy a winning lottery ticket, and then a word will be spoken.

I don’t have a child, otherwise, I’d make it watch Nicolas Cage films with and report back its hilarious comments such as “Daddy, why did the man make Top Gun but shit?”, “Daddy, I am 8 and even I find Con Air to be unpleasant juvenile nonsense”, and “Daddy, what is a snuff film?” I expect some people think it’s bad to make your child watch age inappropriate movies, but it’s okay if they’re only notional.

One of the bad things about having a non-notional child must be their reputedly low threshold for quality: while there are of course many good children’s films, there is also the unfortunate tendency to go down the “What unexpected thing can we make talk for 90 minutes?” route. Once you’ve decided which animated things will talk, cast some Hollywood stars as the voices, make no effort whatsoever to make it entertaining, and reward yourself with a big cocaine sandwich.

This is basically what I was steeling myself for as I hit play on G-Force, the tale of some computer-animated guinea pigs who have been trained to be spies by Zach Galifianakis for some reason. And possibly my incredibly low expectations are why I was so pleasantly surprised: G-Force is not completely uncharming and I was more than happy to watch it with my notional child, except for when he kept making us pause it so he could tell me that I was the “best dad ever” and “definitely not a failure who stinks like gin”.

You can never entirely know where to assign credit for these things, but I have a strong suspicion that the writers should get a lot: because the husband and wife team that brought us the National Treasure movies are back! All praise The Wibberleys (no, seriously, that’s what they’re called) for continuing to purvey completely acceptably entertaining scripts.

The voice work is also not bad — it is still lamentable that they shove in movie stars rather than the usually much better professional voice actors, but everyone (Sam Rockwell, Tracy Morgan and Penélope Cruz star) makes at worst a decent fist of it. Will Arnett turns up playing his (in fairness, amusing) character. And although this is not saying very much, this is by some distance Cage’s best voice work to this point — here he is Speckles, the computer-animated mole who runs the technical side of the spy/guinea pig operation, and sensibly plays it to his cartoonish strengths.

Call me churlish for having a go at the plot of a film about computer-animated guinea pigs if you like, but it does go off the rails a bit at the end with a last act twist in which it’s revealed that the real villain is Speckles the mole. Who then proceeds to turn every electrical appliance in the world into a killing machine in revenge for every mole ever exterminated by humans. It feels a bit too much like some producer just really wanted to make a film about murderous lamps and that got turned down so they insisted on putting them in this one? Anyway, they talk down Speckles and forgive him even after it all got a bit too real so that’s nice.

The only other major criticism I’ve got of G-Force is Bill Nighy’s truly appalling, and apparently unnecessary Australian accent. He’s on of the live action characters, the boss of the firm that makes the murderous electrical appliances; we’re initially supposed to think he’s the villain. Why’s he doing an Australian accent? Is it someone’s incredibly lame dig at Murdoch? Nighy himself protesting the use of British accents to indicate villainy? If you know Bill Nighy, why not ask him incessantly about this until he asks you to go away?

Anyway, I asked my notional kid what their favourite bit was and he said it was when the guinea pig went on the DDR machine. And then vanished back into the fog of imagination when I accidentally knocked over the bottle and became extremely angry.

THE NUMBERS

3 — Speckles claims that if you Google the word “mole” (Is this the first time Cage has said the word Google in a film? I don’t know why I’m asking like anyone other than me is going to find out.), there are 3 million entries, and they’re all about extermination. This isn’t true — there are about 89 million entries, and loads of them are about skin cancer, you vain mole twat.

5 — The bloke who works in the pet shop the guinea pigs find themselves temporarily imprisoned in has a number 5 tattooed on his hand. Presumably, this is a real tattoo belonging to the 27-year-old actor Justin Mentell, who sadly died in a car accident 6 months after the release of this, his final movie. Christ.

9 — Guinea pigs are 9 inches tall, according to one of the guinea pigs. I don’t think this is true, I think guinea pigs are 9 inches long — these guinea pigs just stand on their hind legs a lot because they have been anthropomorphised for the purposes of this fictional film. You can’t train guinea pigs to be spies. It’s a lie.

16 — Zach Galifianakis’s secret guinea pig training base has the number 516 written on the door.

29 — After escaping the base guinea pigs need to reunite with Zach Galifianakis before Clusterstorm (the thing which turns out to be the food mixers coming alive and so on) launches in 29 hours.

33 — The aforementioned pet shop has the zip code 90033. It also a Twitter account, either created by a confused marketing executive or a really dedicated G-Force fan (there has to be at least one by the laws of the internet), but sadly doesn’t appear to have ever tweeted anything. Lazy.

THE RESULT

That’s a solid no, then.

I expect I’ll win on the last one, that would be nicely narratively convenient.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Yet another animated ‘classic’ that I’ve never heard of: Astro Boy. What are Astro Boys, and are they better than guinea pigs?

My name is Ed and I dug up a time capsule and found instructions telling me to play the lottery using numbers from each and every film starring Nicolas Cage. If I do this, I will save the world, and hopefully win the lottery.

There’s a thing you get with high concept Hollywood science fiction movies that I call The Twilight Zone Problem: your whizz-bang clever premise is only enough to sustain an episode of The Twilight Zone (i.e. 50 minutes maximum), so to get it up to the length of a Hollywood movie you have to fill it with loads of extraneous shit.

Perhaps the best example of this is The Box, directed by Richard Kelly, of having failed to capitalise on Donnie Darko because he didn’t understand what anyone else liked about it ‘fame’. The Box was, in fact, adapted from a 20-minute episode of The Twilight Zone: the episode is about a couple who have to decide whether to press a button that will kill someone they don’t know in return for $200,000. To bulk this up to 2 hours Kelly added an interminable plot about aliens using the titular box to test the worthiness of the human race and gave Cameron Diaz a prosthetically deformed foot.

I mention this is as a) Kelly was at one point attached to direct Knowing, b) Knowing suffers heavily from The Twilight Zone Problem.

The basic gist of Knowing is a list of numbers is found inside a time capsule. Astrophysics professor Nicolas Cage deduces that the numbers are a list of disasters from the last 50 years — e.g. part of the sequences is 911012996, correctly indicating that 2996 people would be killed on September 11th, 2001. Can Nicolas Cage stop the remaining disasters? No, not even slightly.

Knowing is an extremely tedious exercise in Nicolas Cage getting aggravated because no-one believes a thing they have no possible reason to believe and that he has absolutely no evidence for. Even writing that it that way makes it sound more interesting than it is — the film doesn’t dwell on the concept that one could know about terrible things happening but be unable to prevent, operating mostly as a schlocky thriller with Cage trying to work out what’s really going on. If ever a film needed a Cage freak out, this was it.

Even with the best reveal in the world, you need a decent journey through the mystery to get there: Knowing gives us some rote crap about creepy kids and men in black, before farting and guiltily holding up a sign saying ‘it’s aliens LOL’.

You could get a decent TV episode out of the time capsule premise — you could start by losing the entire last half hour of the film entirely — but this has so much bogging it down that it sinks. There’s a scene early on where for no obvious reason astrophysics professor Nicolas Cage is lecturing about free will and determinism which might as well have a flashing ‘IT’S THE THEME OF THE MOVIE’ caption. The son of astrophysics professor Nicolas Cage has hearing problems, presumably just to eat up some time by having them do sign language at each other while looking soppy. Rose Byrne’s character is in the film.

Knowing ends with the entire surface of the Earth being consumed in fire and as a whole works as a propaganda piece to comfort viewers into think that might not be such a bad thing after all. Not because aliens might rescue a few kids, but because the universe would be saved from anyone else having to watch this load of old crap ever again.

Amazingly, M Night Shyamalan had nothing to do with this film.

THE NUMBERS

4 — There are 4 million worlds in the galaxy mature enough for life to have evolved, according to astrophysics professor Nicolas Cage. HONK HONK he’s doing exposition.

6 — The teacher of the kid who wrote down the numbers in the first place lives in apartment number 6.

12 — Astrophysics professor Nicolas Cage’s vicar dad always used to preach something from 1 Corinthians 12.

50 — The time capsule is dug up on the 50th anniversary of its burial, which is how time capsules work. Blue Peter was always banging on about time capsules when I was a kid and they never stopped 9/11 so I guess Knowing was right.

51 — One of the predictions involves 51 people dying in a plane crash. 51 people die in a plane crash. Brutal.

59 — The time capsule was originally buried in 1959. They filled it with drawings and letters from school kids, one of whom just filled a sheet of paper with numbers beamed into their head from space and everyone was like ‘yeah whatever just stick that in’. Makes sense.

THE RESULT

One number doesn’t help. ONE NUMBER DOESN’T HELP.

I hope the stupid world does all burn up in a fire.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

G-Force. It’s about guinea pigs. That sounds good.

My name is Ed and I have watched 53 Nicolas Cage films and entered the lottery 53 times and I have never killed anyone not even one person I swear.

Bangkok Dangerous is the Pang Brothers’ own remake of their 1999 debut, a Thai thriller about a deaf-mute hitman. In the retooled US version, Cage takes the lead, but not the hearing problem, which is transferred to the love interest. This decision, by the directors’ own admission driven by marketing rather than creativity, is a shame, as seeing Cage take an (in effect) silent role would at least make something stand out about this otherwise fairly dull film.

Our ‘hero’ Joe isn’t really much of a character: he’s sad because his job is shooting people and then when he’s finished he has to shoot the people who helped him shoot the people. Poor Joe. But we never get any insight into this, given that he can’t be honest (or even really communicate) with the one character who has any sympathy for him, his deaf-mute girlfriend. He just sits on the screen looking mournful as he does unpleasant things. I mean, he also hangs out with his sidekick and we get to wonder if he will shoot him in the head like he did the last one, so that’s a lot of fun.

There’s nothing offensively bad about any of this, it’s just sort of drab, livened up only by a handful of moments of competently shot action. The romantic sub-plot is presumably supposed to act as relief but is in itself a bit tortuously saccharine as it basically just consists of them grinning at each other like idiots until she realises he’s a hitman and looks upset at him instead. In the main, miserable things happen miserably, mostly in shades of brown and grey.

The film drifts to the inevitably bloody, unhappy, conclusion that all films about slightly sad hitman have legally required reach, and I was mainly left thinking that it has been a while since I’ve seen Leon. Even his hair’s doing that thing it was doing in ‘Next’ where it looks like it wants to fly away to star in a better movie.

THE NUMBERS

4 — The Bangkok job involves making 4 hits. A hit means to kill someone. Don’t do it, that’s illegal.
9 — The hit we see Joe make in the opening happens at precisely 9pm, according to his Ventura V-Tec Sigma W25-R1.
19 — Production of the film was held up by the Thai coup d’état, which took place on Tuesday 19 September 2006. Probably more exciting than the film, too.
25 — Joe’s much-featured watch, as noted above, is the Ventura V-Tec Sigma W25-R1. Why not buy one and tell them the idiot lottery man sent you?
28 — According to his false passport, Joe was born on 28 May 71. Cage was actually born in 1964, so we can only conclude that Joe is a very vain man.
46 — Joe’s account code for the account where he keeps all his murder money is 6514346.

THE RESULT

I hate stupid hitmen. 0 numbers.

Let me win the lottery. Please. I just want to win it once.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Knowing. IT’S ABOUT NUMBERS THAT PREDICT THE FUTURE.

This is it guys. This is it.

My name is Ed and I am trying to win the lottery by watching Nicolas Cage films. Maybe watching all of Nicolas Cage’s films in order is the secret to transcending spacetime and leaving behind the human meatform to become one with the Godhead, but if not I would be happy with a few million quid.

National Treasure: Book Of Secrets is a first, in that it’s a second — amazingly, more than 25 years into his career, Nic Cage hadn’t made a sequel. But National Treasure had been his first smash hit in a while, and presumably years of buying castles, crocodiles, etc, had been taking their toll on the old bank balance.

Book Of Secrets follows the formula of the first film pretty closely — albeit Ed Harris has subbed in for Sean Bean as chief bad guy treasure hunter, and instead of lost templar treasure they’re after the secret truth behind the Lincoln assassination. But broadly it’s the same deal: our heroes following a trail of increasingly ludicrous clues, do heists, solve codes, uncover mysteries and generally get into a lot of bother.

The stakes are raised a bit as this time the trail takes Ben Gates and pals overseas: it’s National Treasure’s European Vacation! After a brief stopover in France to check out a secret code carved on the Parisian replica of the Statue of Liberty, they head to London to break into Buckingham Palace in order to locate a clue hidden in the Queen’s desk. Yes, really.

This, I believe, Cage’s first time on film in my town — there might be a bit on ‘the Thames’ in rowing-based garbage The Boy In Blue but I’m not counting that because those scenes are blatantly shot in Canada. Londoners may be mildly amused at the geography of a car chase which involves driving south over Westminster Bridge to reach Whitehall. Or not, it’s your life.

The crowning achievement of the London is sequence involves Nicolas Cage pretending to be inebriated in Buckingham Palace and affecting an amazingly poor British accent before sliding down some banisters screaming “I’VE GOT A LOVELY BUNCH OF COCONUTS”. This in itself an immensely powerful image, but the fact that it is entirely justified by the plot makes it a masterpiece of filmmaking.

As well as the main trio of adventurers (Gates/Cage, the nerd one, and the love interest one), Harvey Keitel’s back as a somewhat inexplicable freemason/FBI agent and Jon Voight’s back as Gates’ dad: but to liven things up this time we also meet Gates’ mum, who is, obviously, played by Helen bloody Mirren.

Although in some ways this is very much a retreading of old ground there’s just enough new bits and pieces thrown into the mix to indicate that the writers actually understand how to make this stuff work and aren’t just slavishly copying their first fluke. And if these films couldn’t be any more charmingly ridiculous, both are credited to a husband and wife screenwriting team called, I shit you not, The Wibberleys.

THE NUMBERS

2 — Part of the plot revolves around clues hidden inside the “Resolute twins”, a pair of identical desks made out of the timbers of a ship called the Resolute. One of these, in the Oval Office, exists in real life and is indeed used by most Presidents. The other, in Buckingham Palace, doesn’t really exist, although there are other desks made from parts of the same ship knocking about the place.

3 — As referenced in the film, the sculptor of the Statue of Liberty, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, did indeed create 2 other versions of the statue. They’re both in Paris, if you want to go and look at smaller versions of the Statue of Liberty for some reason. We’re laughing and learning!

5 — The film starts in 1865, specifically 5 days after the end of the American Civil War (although the date given is actually when General Lee surrendered, elsewhere people kept shooting at each other for another couple of months, probably for the banter).

18 — The John Wilkes Booth (him what killed Lincoln with a gun) diary is said to be missing 18 pages. In real life, this has been demonstrated to be an underestimate: the FBI forensic lab reckons it’s actually missing 86 pages. (I imagine it’s just like: April 12th — didn’t shoot him yet. April 13th — still didn’t shoot him, April 14th — OMG LADS BIG NEWS).

25 —At one point Gate’s dad distracts some secret service guys by pretending to be fishing. When questioned about this he tells the secret service guys that according to Article 1, Section 25 of local law he’s allowed to be there. They respond that they’re allowed to detain him for 48 hours for no reason. America!

47 — The President of the United States tells Gates to have a look at Page 47 of the titular Book of Secrets. Gates reports back that what he saw there was ‘life-altering’. This is presumably set-up for the 3rd National Treasure film, which has never materialised because Hollywood is dumb. Why not write down what you think was on Page 47 and pop it in the bin?

THE RESULT

What the HELL? They are called the National TREASURE films. How can I not have won any treasure? This makes no sense. I think the freemasons are fixing the lottery.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Bangkok Dangerous