My name is Ed, and since January I have been watching every film Nicolas Cage has ever made. Also two TV shows and a piece of avant-garde musical theatre that he was in. I have been doing this in order to win the UK National Lottery, because I believe that Nic Cage’s ‘nouveau shamanic’ acting style accesses the fundamental forces of the universe and has the power to affect probability, causing me to pick the six winning numbers by watching his films.
I have now watched all of those films, finishing with: The Trust.
A recurring theme in recent entries has been my exasperation with films that have absolutely no reason to exist. It’s not that anyone needs to have a particular justification for making a film, but it’s depressing to watch an entire film that no-one involved appears to have any interest in. Are there massive tax incentives for studios to produce tedious thrillers starring Nicolas Cage regardless of whether anyone actually wants to make those films, or indeed pay to see them.
Thankfully, The Trust lets me on a high note. Or indeed, a… heist note. Aren’t words fun?
The film sees Cage and noted hobbit Elijah Wood as a pair of disaffected Las Vegas cops. Cage is Jim Stone, so bored with his unrewarding work and depressed by his superiors’ lack of interest in doing anything but the bare minimum that when he stumbles across evidence of a huge haul of criminal cash, he decides that today is his lucky day. He recruits his colleague Waters (Wood) to help him locate and steal the money: nothing can possibly go wrong, except everything that inevitably does.
At its core The Trust is a very blackly comedic character piece, with a really nice sense of how to play off humour with real tension — Cage’s character in particular, one of his most brilliantly odd in a while, turns on a knife edge between hilarious and terrifying. The whole film turns on this, and Cage steps up to the plate to knock out one of his best performances in years. Is that how sports metaphors work? Who knows? I have watched 76 of these films and I am so tired.
I’m sometimes unconvinced by Elijah Wood as an actor, but he’s perfect here as the ever-more rattled sidekick, who realises too late that he might not be entirely up on, or even in on, what’s really going on. When I watched The Trust for the first earlier in the year, I was a bit dismissive of Jerry Lewis’s slightly unlikely cameo as Stone’s dad, but I think it’s a better bit of deadpan work than I gave him credit for.
The Trust is a fairly slight piece of work, put it is a proper piece of work, something that people were excited to make, were excited about making, and were honestly excited to have made. It’s not ‘rush out and buy it now’ brilliant, more ‘if it happens to be on the telly’, but you know. It’s not a shit version of Rocky but with rowing, it doesn’t feature any crusaders with terrible accents and thank Christ it doesn’t involve Nic Cage having to rescue another boring kid.
THE NUMBERS
3 — Waters says it took him 3 hours to make his plan of the building where the safe is hidden. This work is Da Vinci-esque, according to Stone.
5 — Stone becomes suspicious that the drug dealer he’s tailing is bothering to show up 5 nights a week on time to stock a bar, instead of spending all his drugs money.
6 — When the drill they’re using to access the safe breaks, they have a quarter of an inch left, which is about 6mm.
10 — The special drill they order costs them 10 grand each. I’d be happy with the 10 grand to be honest. Pay off a bit of debt, go on a little holiday.
18 — When a security guard comes to check on the apartment they pretend they’re on a police observation assignment, telling him they’ve been there for 18 hours.
28 — The opening shot of the film includes Las Vegas’s High Roller Ferris wheel, which has 28 cabins.
3, 5, 6, 10, 18 and 28.
The numbers which, will, presumably, win me the National Lottery.
It can’t not work.
It can’t.
THE RESULT
Lottery draw: 2169
Date: Wednesday 5 October, 2016
Jackpot: £16,333,383
Draw machine: Lancelot
Ball set: 7
Balls drawn: 11,16,25,37,43,44
Bonus ball: 39
Numbers selected: 3,5,6,10,18,28
Matching balls: 0
Numbers selected (lucky dip): N/A
Matching balls (lucky dip): N/A
Winnings: £0 (£0 to date)
Total Profit/Loss: £-150
0 numbers.
Well.
Piss.
Cost of playing the lottery based on Nicolas Cage films:
£150 (It would have been £152 I forgot to buy a ticket that one week, although I wouldn’t have won anything anyway.)
Winnings:
£0
10 months of Nicolas Cage films and if anything I’m even more destitute and miserable than I was when I started.
So what have we learned?
Is it the case that you cannot, in fact, win the National Lottery simply by watching every film Nicolas Cage as ever made? Was the whole premise completely flawed, and if I’m honest, just an attempt to give a vague sense of structure to a series of film reviews? Is the real lesson you learn by watching Nicolas Cage films the friends you made along the way?
No
Because of course, I haven’t seen every film Nicolas Cage has ever made.
Yet.
I mean, there are two Nicolas Cage films out right now that I haven’t seen because I don’t live in either the USA or the Philippines.
IMDB lists no less than six others being to be released between now and then end of 2017. The man is a goddamned movie-making machine.
But in the meantime, maybe I’ll try watching a film that doesn’t have Nicolas Cage in.
Winning The Lottery With Nicolas Cage Will Return
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