My name is Ed and I will soon have seen every film Nicolas Cage has ever made. I will also be a millionaire, because every time I watch one of the films, I pick 6 numbers and use them to enter the UK National Lottery. There is no way that this plan cannot succeed.

Christianity, for all its faults, has produced some astonishing art, e.g. Bruegel’s Tower of Babel, Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, a straight-to-DVD movie in which Ted McGinley has to stop the shittest Baldwin brother from banning Christmas. It’s also responsible for Left Behind series of books which I’m led to believe are the evangelical version of Tom Clancy thrillers, and thus this film, the second attempt to adapt them for non-reading Christians, following a trilogy so bad the original authors sued the producers for breach of contract.

The premise of Left Behind is that, for reasons never clearly established in this film, God has decided that its time to go a Rapturing, and several million people are suddenly transported to heaven, leaving everyone else somewhat bewildered. Cage, presumably in it for the reported $3 million cheque rather than his deep love of the Lord, plays the improbably named airline pilot Rayford Steele. Midair at the time of the Rapture, can Steele get his plane safely back on the ground despite the ensuing chaos? Probably, with the assistance of a former teen heartthrob with three first names and a blonde lady from Neighbours who must be really annoyed about how well Margot Robbie’s doing.

The slightly baffling cast list also includes Lea Thompson from Back To The Future, American Idol winner Jordin Sparks and a former Olympic bobsledder. Ashley Tisdale from High School Musical was at one point going to play Cage’s daughter but sadly dropped out. It was directed by the guy who was Harrison Ford’s stunt double in the Indiana Jones films. What is life?

It must be so bad it’s good, right? Right?

Sounds of someone blowing a raspberry goes here.

Mainly the issue is that the plot is almost non-existent— there are thirty painfully event-free minutes before the Rapture happens, in which very standard character types are laboriously laid out as though the viewer has never seen a film before, or ever met a human being. Even after that, there’s not a great deal going on: Cage tries to land his plane, the daughter wanders around witnessing the aftermath and looking sad.

The problem, I would guess, is that Left Behind is deliberately hedging its bets: it wants to stay true to its evangelical origins but also take a punt at the mainstream (hence shelling out for Cage). A lot of the more ‘out there’ elements of the books have been dropped, including Israel being protected from Russian bombs by a heavenly forcefield, the UN being taken over by the literal antichrist and the formation of a team called ‘Tribulation Force’ to fight him. But there’s also no exploration of the premise, no consideration of the philosophical (or religious) implications of living through the Rapture: no-one ever really asks ‘Hey, why didn’t I get to go to heaven?’. Instead, we just get poorly written action movie character banter dragged out for an hour and a half.

As if it could get any slower, the ‘big action finale’ involves one of the characters driving a fucking steam-roller. A sequel is apparently planned, although the producers’ crowdfunding campaign raised less than 20% than they were asking for, so presumably they won’t be able to afford Nicolas Cage next time. Praise be.

THE NUMBERS

3 — Nicolas Cage’s plane leaves from Terminal 3.

6 — The flight to London will take 6 hours. A character mentions this will all change with the HYPERJET, which I guess must have been on the news on the afternoon the screenwriter spent on the script.

13 — The film closes on a quotation. “But of that day and that hour, knoweth no man.” It’s from Mark 13:32, which I believe is part of the Bible.

16 — The flight departs from gate C16. C16 is the World Health Organization code for stomach cancer, which is not mentioned in this film.

24 — A lady tells hotshot journalist Buck Williams that Matthew 24:7 predicts the end of the world, which I suppose is better than asking whether someone got paid for this or arguing with the headline instead of the article.

32 — When the daughter is trying to escape the post-Rapture chaos of the mall, we see a guy who appears to have shop-lifted a 32 inch TV. 32 inches! Have some ambition mate. Have some bloody ambition.

THE RESULT

Zero numbers on either this ticket or the Lucky Dip I won last time. God is clearly dead.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Dying Of The Light

My name is Ed and I need to win the lottery because the sum total of my worldly wealth is £9.98 in change plus some foreign coins and a coin shaped token from commemorating some event I attended in 2012. Have you seen the price of the own brand Tesco lager these days? This no way to live. In order to guarantee that I will win the lottery I am picking the numbers using the complete works of Nicolas Cage, in order, in the hope that the otherworldly magic channelled by his best performances will somehow bring me luck.

Outcast starts with two Crusaders, one of whom is played by Nicolas Cage, abandoning their mission because they’re sickened by the murder of innocents and oh my god wasn’t Season Of The Witch bad enough the first time? The two films have similar enough openings that I genuinely started to wonder if I was finally properly losing it, 71 Cage projects in.

The storylines diverge a few minutes in, and Outcast takes a less tediously supernatural tack, as instead of going home they run away to China, for no readily explained reason. Instead of Ron Perlman, Cage is accompanied by Hayden Christensen, apparently determined to prove that the Star Wars prequels won’t be the nadir of his acting life.

The plot concerns the succession of the Emperor’s throne, the old Emperor’s dying wish that throne go to his quiet sensible youngest son rather than his bloodthirsty warmonger eldest son. This obviously works out well for everyone concerned. The younger son and a sister end up on the run, hiring Hayden Christensen, who’s actually ostensibly the star of this, to protect them.

About the best you can say for Christensen here is that he avoids attempting to act if at all possible, though there is a weird subplot about him being hooked on opium that seems to have lost any point it might have had somewhere in the cutting room.

Then you get to Nic Cage, who isn’t actually in this very much and appears to have no interest in the movie as written, instead opting to play a sort of ersatz Captain Jack Sparrow. Between laughing his head off, wearing a series of improbable hats and barking bizarre dialogue like “The Black Guards are as thick as flies on a farting goat’s arse”, it’s hard to credit that he’s doing anything else than outright taking the piss. On the other hand this bizarre turn is the only thing of any interest in the film whatsoever, so fair play.

Eventually the plot plods towards the predictable conclusion via some dull travelogue and rote fight scenes, without ever having stopped to consider things like characters, story or a comprehensible screenplay. There’s a strange moment where someone raises the idea that autocracy might not be that great whoever wins, which is a sort of weird thing to hang a lampshade on unless you’re seriously worried about people getting offended by the politics of a fictional, ahistorical, version of 12th century China.

Outcast seems to have been a badly calculated attempt at a film with wide international appeal, i.e. putting ‘established’ American stars in a Chinese setting. Unfortunately a Christensen/Cage pairing was deemed unworthy of US cinemas, and the Chinese release was delayed over censorship issues. Oops. Still, I can only assume it will win me the lottery.

THE NUMBERS

3 — Our merry band of outcasts takes in a girl whose village has been destroyed by the Black Guard. Qiang says it’s worth the trouble because their enemies seek 3…

4 — not 4. There really aren’t a lot of numbers in this film. No bloody number plates in the 12th century.

10 — Qiang, the would-be boy emperor is accused by Nicolas Cage of being 10.

12 — The history in this film is vague in a way that suggests no-one involved could be arsed to crack a book, but a caption near the start informs us that we’re in the 12th century.

14 — Qiang, the would-be boy emperor is actually 14. This is a bit embarrassing. Put more numbers in your movies.

18 — According to Chinese mythology, as referenced here, there are 18 levels of hell. Presumably on one of those levels you have to watch Outcast over and over again.

THE RESULT

2 numbers, so I win a Lucky Dip. Outcast finally paid off for someone!

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Left Behind

My name is Ed and in a few short weeks I will have seen every Nicolas Cage movie, until they release another one. And presumably by then I will have won the UK National Lottery, because after I watch each film I purchase a ticket using numbers based on that film. The shamanic acting force of Cage will make me a millionaire. Or it will make me lose the will to live. One of those.

Rage is a revenge thriller about Nicolas Cage taking revenge on someone because that is apparently what happens by default nowadays if you don’t cast himself in anything else. Basically: daughter of gangster-made-good turns up dead, gangster experiences the emotion of rage, goes bad again.

While the title might promise that at least there could be some classic Cage freak-outs, this is pound shop Sopranos stuff, shot with all the flair of an instructional video about operating a filing cabinet.

The majority of Rage’s runtime consists slightly tragic-looking old men growling at or occasionally beating the shit out of each other, occasionally interspersed with photocopied action sequences. Danny Glover, playing a police detective in a stunningly original piece of casting, spends the whole film looking aggravated that someone got him out of bed for this, and fair enough.

Maybe if it was prepared to wink at its own melodrama there might have been something in it. Cage does at least give the awful dialogue the ridiculous delivery it deserves. “Just how deep do you want this to go?”, one of his henchmen asks. Cage stares directly into his eyes as he gruffly replies: “How deep is hell?” But the only real levity on offer from this rubbish is in how seriously it takes itself.

The twist, for there is a twist, is risible: it comes so far out of the blue that it might as well have been “It was all a dream!” or “They were all holograms!”, although what actually happens is more of a sad fart of plot. We, the audience, are told that the last 90 minutes were more or less a complete waste of everyone’s time, and are somehow to supposed to be impressed by this.

Maybe this is really a sort of Happy Shopper Taken, an overly elaborate power fantasy for past-it dads who reckon they would definitely be up for smashing some heads in with the right justification. “Rage? Cracking film!” laughs your girlfriend’s dad, minutes after you meet him for the first time, refusing to break eye contact.

Any given aspect of Rage that’s even slightly enjoyable has been done better elsewhere, in superior films. Only it winning me the lottery can justify its existence, so fingers crossed.

THE NUMBERS

3 — The bullet recovered from the daughter’s body is linked to 3 earlier murders done with the same gun.

5 — Chernov, the head of the rival gang, says he served 5 years of an 8-year prison sentence.

16 — The daughter misses her Sweet Sixteen party. Because she’s dead. Although at other points in the film they seem to say that she was 17. Possibly no-one ever bothered reading the script all the way through to check it made sense.

17 —Maguire, the Cage character, says he killed his first man at the age of 17, with a knife. Sounds like a lot of bother.

33 — The gun that does most of the shooting in this film Tokarev TT-33. At one point the film was going to be called “Tokarev” but they probably changed it because only the psychos who update the Internet Movie Firearms Database would have known what that was.

50 — Maguire drives a Mustang painted the same as the Mustang GT500 in earlier Cage effort Gone In Sixty Seconds. It says on IMDB.

THE RESULT

1 number. Stupid Rage, the worst of all the emotions.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Outcast

Nice.

My name is Ed, and I am desperately trying to win the lottery before I run out of money and have to live in a bin. You might think pinning all your hopes on winning the lottery is stupid, but I have a plan. I am picking the lottery numbers using Nicolas Cage films.

Joe contains something unprecedented, as far as I can remember:

FULL. BEARD. CAGE.

We’ve had various arrangements of hair on and around Cage’s head, but the beard here is very, very, powerful. Hold me Mr Cage, tell me it will be okay. Tell me I will win the lottery.

It’s a bit sad that, at this point in Cage’s career, it’s notable that this is the second actual proper film in a row – i.e. something you can at least imagine someone watching by choice even if they aren’t trying to win the lottery by watching all of the Nicolas Cage films.

Joe is the rather melancholy tale of a troubled man trying to finally make an honest go of it as a tree poisoner in a grim bit of furthest flung Texas. He’s not sure if he can save himself, but he can at least try to save the teenage boy he’s somehow become a sort of substitute father to. By helping him to become a tree poisoner. Is tree poisoner a real job? They even have special tree poisoning backpacks with poison-dispensing axes.

As if a film about tree poisoning wasn’t upbeat enough, the other major character is the boy’s real father, a spectacularly unpleasant violent alcoholic drifter, vividly portrayed by Gary Poulter, in his first and only major acting role. When cast, Poulter was homeless — his only other screen credit was an appearance as an extra nearly 30 years previously: he was found dead months before the release of Joe, which provides some much-needed feel-good background.

There’s not a lot about this film that isn’t bleak: by the end there are a few notes of redemption, but you’ve got to get through a lot of dark before there’s any kind of light on display. This is a violent, ugly, hellish world, with no authority apparently willing or able to intervene. Though the police make a few appearances, in the main everyone is left to get on with whatever unspeakable acts they feel like doing. I don’t know if this is a damning indictment or extremely unfair portrayal of e.g. Texas’s Child Protective Services department, but it’s not exactly a tourist board ad.

Like The Frozen Ground, this is not in itself a stand out Cage role, but it’s good work that manages to show more than it tells. It’s not a wildly entertaining performance, but that’s not what the material needs: one might reasonably Cage’s judgement regarding the roles he picks, but more restrained work like this does suggest that when he is ‘out of control’ that it’s a little bit more deliberate than he’s sometimes given credit for.

Joe has some compelling performances, but it is tough to recommend — in some ways it echoes the likes of Bad Lieutenant and Wild At Heart, but there the bleakness was at least tempered with surreality and black humour. Is this supposed to throw the more banal miseries of human existence into sharp relief, as we reflect that at least we’re not having the shit kicked out of us by our pisshead dads? I dunno. Hopefully it’ll win me the lottery.

THE NUMBERS

3 — When we first meet Joe, he’s sitting in his truck, while outside it pisses it down the rain. The radio announces that there will be 3 inches of rain.

10 — One of the cars parked outside the general store is a ‘Custom Deluxe 10’. No idea what this means.

16 — When Joe first meets the Gary, the teenage kid he takes under his wing, Gary is wearing a 16 Candles t-shirt. For some reason. 16 Candles is a film about Molly Ringwald’s pants. Nicolas Cage isn’t in it.

29 —It’s mentioned that Joe at one point served 29 months in prison for assaulting some police officers.

45 — Joe gives the kid 45 seconds to tell him why he should hire him.

48 — Joe is 48 years old.

THE RESULT

Nothing on the main ticket, only one number on the Lucky Dip ticket I won last time. So basically only watch Joe if you want to see a load of miserable stuff happen for no reason.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Rage

My name is Ed, and I am still slogging through the slim pickings that are the recent works of Nicolas Cage, because even though a lot of these films are bad, I still ostensibly believe that by picking six numbers connected to them, I will win the National Lottery

This time: It’s another Con Air reunion, and a role reversal of sorts, as John Cusack plays the criminal to Nic Cage’s copper. The Frozen Ground is a more of less true story about the Alaskan serial killer Robert Hansen (Cusack) and his eventual arrest after the escape of would-have-been victim Cindy Paulson (Vanessa Hudgens from off of High School Musical). Cage plays an invented character apparently based on a number of real law enforcement officials, because he is Cage, and he contains multitudes.

Cage’s performance is not flashy, but it also avoids the ‘subdued to the point of coma’ stuff he can sometimes end up in when trying to tone things down — there’s a sort of low, bubbling intensity: the sense that he could go Full Cage at any moment, even if he never quite does. It shows that he is, or at least can be, a much more thoughtful performer than he’s often given credit for. Although if you’re voluntarily going to appear in stuff like Season of the Witch you can’t really complain that people think you’re quite shit now for some reason.

The non-Cage cast are pretty solid, although anyone familiar with the High School Musical series may have the odd sensation that Vanessa Hudgens is at any moment about to start singing a song about being an underage prostitute.

There are other things to like about The Frozen Ground — production was apparently delayed 5 months so director Scott Walker (not that one) could shoot the location sequences at just the right time of year, and it paid off, if you like looking at lots of beautifully shot bleak bits of Alaska on the cusp of winter, which I apparently do.

In the end something doesn’t quite work about The Frozen Ground — I don’t know whether there’s something fundamentally uncinematic about the events it’s depicting or if it’s a failure of the adaptation process, but ultimately it’s just a bit straightforward. We know what’s going on, the characters basically know what’s going on, so it’s just a waiting game for them to find something that will actually prove it. It’s more frustrating than it is tense, slightly too strung out for it’s own good with not enough to fill the gaps other than yet another scene of Cage looking intense in the cold.

The Frozen Ground is a well-made, but slightly too basic thriller. I mean, there’s only so much artistic license one should probably take with this kind of thing, and it’s in some ways fine tribute to the dogged persistence of the man/men who brought down a serial killer, but it doesn’t quite work as a film. Which is a problem, because it is one.

THE NUMBERS

7 — Cindy says that Robert Hansen told her he’d taken 7 girls before her.

10 — The film opens with a quote from the Bible — Matthew 10:16. It’s good to include a quote from the Bible at the beginning of a film because then the audience knows it’s a really important and worthwhile film.

18 — Cindy initially claims to be 23, but later admits that she’s actually 18. I mean, Vanessa Hudgens was actually 24 when they made it but it’s just pretend.

21 — Cage’s character’s sister was killed by a drunk driver on his 21st birthday.

23 — Hansen used a .223 caliber rifle to shoot at things, including young women. Is it weird to be effectively picking numbers based on a real serial killer?

30 — The film is set in 1983, 30 years before it was released. Because that’s how time works.

THE RESULT

Well, at least I didn’t win any money (two numbers on the main ticket and one on the Lucky Dip I won last time) so we now know for certain that serial killing is bad and that you shouldn’t do it. Phew!

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Joe

My name is Ed and when I have finished watching every film Nicolas Cage has ever been in, I will finally know happiness. If for no other reason than because I will have definitely managed to win the UK National Lottery using numbers picked from one of those films. As the famous saying goes: money can absolutely buy you happiness. Or a swimming pool, which is much the same thing.

I don’t know that anyone’s ever really queried the origin of the techno-stone age society we are presented with in enduringly popular cigarette advert The Flintstones, but for whatever reason a few years ago Dreamworks decided to answer that unasked question and make The Croods.

The Croods start their film as a simple hunter-gathering lot; Cage plays the father, Grug, dedicated to keeping his family safely inside their cave as much possible away from anything new or dangerous. In particular, various prehistoric beasts that are all luridly-coloured wacky ‘mash-ups’ of modern day animals: elephants the size of mice, turtles with wings, and so on. Must have taken literally an afternoon to think of.

Teenage daughter Eep is bored of this, wanting a bit more adventure in her life. Her wish is granted when a) a teenage boy turns up and b) the Croods’ cave is destroyed in an earthquake, literally hurling them into an exciting new world where they’re forced to start thinking. They’re not quite a modern stone-age family by the end of the film, but they’ve started domesticating animals and have invented manned flight by glueing loads of birds to a gigantic animal’s rib cage: can foot-powered motor vehicles be far off?

Like the last cartoon Cage movie, Astro Boy, the best animation in Croods is the ‘2D’ exposition sequence that starts the movie: self-imposed limitation resulting in something more interesting than the infinite possibility of the competently realised, but rarely surprising, three-dimensional world most of the film’s set in. Worse still, it teeters on the edge of the uncanny valley — while the characters are stylised, some of the detail is realistic enough that the whole thing becomes occasionally unsettling. It’s a bit like those weird live action Asterix movies where the comic book violence becomes slightly horrifying once you see it being done to real actors.

The script is pretty thin stuff — the story amounts to ‘let’s go over here, for some reason’, the moral: ‘ideas are good’. Raise one eyebrow for the story credit given to John Cleese, who worked on the original version when it was going to be an Aardman claymation job before eventually sitting in production hell for 10 years. Co-director/writer Chris Sanders gives Cleese some slightly back-handed credit for Grug’s hatred of anything new, which he says reflects Cleese’s own attitudes. Someone mean could point out that it’s also reflected by the film’s total lack of originality: hey and indeed, oooooo.

But despite it’s flaws The Croods does just about get away with it. Grug probably represents Cage’s best voice work: not a patch on his best live action performances, nothing to trouble the sleep of a proper voice actor, but a properly realised character. All the acting and animation does no more or less than what’s required, treading a careful line between simplistic and irritating. It’s even got Ryan Reynolds in it, who has spent his entire career somehow being quite likeable despite having almost never been in anything any good at all.

The highs and lows of attempting to watch all the Nicolas Cage films are such that sometimes ‘a basically amiable film for children’ is exactly what you need, i.e. it was not very good, but at least it was not a thriller so crap that it made me physically angry. Half a limply-raised thumbs up.

THE NUMBERS

2 — The Croods use a two knuckle warning, i.e. the Sun is two knuckles from the horizon when you hold your hand-up, to indicate that it is time to go hide in their cave. Bear with me on this one it’s a film about cavemen so there’s not even any number plates in it.

4 — At the start of the film Eep lists off four other cave people families and various untimely deaths. The sequel (currently in production) better feature some less dead people, because one quite small family plus a Ryan Reynolds indicates sad times in The Croods’ genetic future.

5 — The Croods is apparently set in a fictitious era of the Pliocene called the Croodaceous (lo, it is a pun) period. The Pliocene started around 5.333 million years ago, it says on Wikipedia.

6 — At the start of the film, there are 6 Croods. Grug counts them at various points, always hoping that his mother-in-law will have died. My mother-in-law, my mother-in-law, I wish she was literally dead LOL!

12 — Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture is played during a sequence where some giant corn goes on fire and turns out to be a sort of naturally growing firework. I do not think this film has much educational value, to be honest.

58 — The Croods grossed $587.2 million worldwide, making it by some distance the best performing film Cage has made this century, possibly ever depending on how you calculate your inflation adjustments. He is reportedly returning for the sequel.

THE RESULT

Well, The Croods has not saved me from collapse in the same way that it apparently saved Dreamworks Animation after they’d pissed away all their money on a catastrophically shit film about the tooth fairy having a fight with the easter bunny (or something).

But 2 numbers, so a free Lucky Dip next time!

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

The Frozen Ground

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

My name is Ed, and I am watching Nicolas Cage films then playing the lottery using numbers based on those films until I can find someone who can lift this awful curse. This time: Ghost Rider 2!

Expectations were low. It’s unfortunate that the second time Cage chose to make a sequel, it was the follow-up to one of the worst films he’s ever been in. But, there was some hope: the creative (loosely spooking) team behind the first film did not return, and directorial team Neveldine/Taylor stepped up to lead the sequel. They’d been wanting to work with Cage for a while: their most infamous work, Crank, was written with him in mind for the part that Jason Statham ended up with (Chev Chelios, a man who will die if he can’t keep up his adrenaline levels up — surely one of the greatest action movie premises of all time).

God damn it, I could have been watching Crank instead of the sodding Wicker Man remake.

The first thing Spirit of Vengeance does is to make the wise decision to completely ignore the first film. The origin story quickly related at the start is, in broad strokes, the same, but beyond that everything else has been ditched, including Cage’s spectacularly shit hairpiece. Sequel or not, is it any good?

Well, on a purely surface level, Neveldine/Taylor know how to make a viscerally entertaining movie. This is a somewhat tempered version of the non-stop chaotic roar of the Crank movies but the gist is the same: increasingly unhinged things happen at an increasingly frenetic pace. Cage is much more ‘man on the edge’ than in the first film, hurling himself around manically while fighting the literal demon inside him. It’s obvious stuff, but it’s definitely more engaging than the “eat Smarties and looked confused” turn we got last time.

I dunno whether they shot in Eastern Europe for tax breaks or whatever, but they made the most of it, with some stunning location work using everything from Gothic castles to villages carved into the side mountains. The supporting cast boasts Idris Elba doing a questionable French accent, Christopher Lambert from Highlander with all tattoos on his face, and Anthony Head from Buffy, very briefly, before getting stabbed up good.

Unfortunately, none of this is quite enough to save it. The story’s straightforward thrust (goodies must look after/rescue kid), is derailed by its baffling details. The Devil (Ciarán Hinds, largely bemused) has made a deal with a lady to have a baby with him and now The Devil wants to steal his own son’s body because that’s the plot of the film I guess? Oh no! Will the Ghost Rider (who it now turns out is an *angelic* skeleton on fire) be able to stop him by driving a motorbike really fast? Handwave handwave handwave something explodes!

The film’s most active bad guy (A.J. from Empire Records, fans of fondly remembered but not very good films!) is turned into a very cheap looking monster about halfway through (he ends up looking like one of the bad guys from Stargate: Atlantis, fans of pissing your entire life away watching nothing but garbage!) and the visual gimmick that he’s hard to fight because he’s magically surrounded by darkness is more confusing than anything else. Why does shooting the Ghost Rider with a rocket sometimes blow him up so much that he turns back into Nicolas Cage and has to go to hospital but sometimes doesn’t really affect him? Why anything?

I suspect that, on the page, there’s not a lot between the two Ghost Rider movies. Spirit of Vengeance is on another level in terms of the execution of any given shot, but in the end is still largely risible once all those shots are put together and called a film.

But you get to see the skeleton on fire doing a big fiery skeleton piss. Twice.

THE NUMBERS

3 — AJ from Empire Records complains that the Ghost Rider turned 3 of his guys into matchsticks. That’s a metaphor for ‘burning them to death’.

5 — The film opens with a man driving a motorbike with the number plate Nc5 753T. I thought maybe the NC was going to stand for Nicolas Cage but it turned out Idris Elba was riding it. At one point the numberplate is backwards because the lazy idiots flipped a shot of the Romanian castle Idris Elba drives into.

13 — The film plays with the idea that the Ghost Rider can demonically transform anything that he rides, notably including the Bagger 288, an excavating machine that was at one point the largest vehicle on earth, weighing 13,500 tons. I suspect they had storyboards for some of this movie before writing any of the plot.

14 — Mephistopheles or Roarke or whatever the hell they’re calling him instead of just The Devil in this one drives a car with the number plate RK 14 ADV

22 — In the ‘don’t worry if you missed the first film, it’s not even canon now’ explanatory narration, Cage explains that he once did a bare ass triple 360 back flip in front of 22,000 people.

50 — While leading Nic Cage to some sort of special magical monk room that will cure him of ‘being a Ghost Rider’ Idris Elba picks up and swigs from an old bottle of wine he claims is worth 50,000 Euros. Bloody Brexit!

THE RESULT

Two numbers! Free lucky dip! So Spirit of Vengeance really must be better than the first Ghost Rider. Thanks, Crank dudes.

It’s been nice being part of Team GB the last few weeks just because I buy lottery tickets. I consider all the Team GB athletes to be part of Team Winning The Lottery With Nicolas Cage, and hope they’ll contribute at least 10% of future sponsorship and advertising earnings to helping me with running costs, i.e. lager beer.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Stolen

My name is Ed and in less than 3 months time, I will have seen every film Nicolas Cage has ever made. I’ve been watching two a week, each time choosing 6 numbers based on that film and using them to play the UK National Lottery, which I intend to win, using the mystical energy channeled by Nicolas Cage performances.

There’s a thing they have in Hollywood where development executives vote on their favourite unproduced scripts and the ‘best’ ones make it onto something called The Black List. While some entries on the list end up becoming properly good films, even the people who compile the list admit on their website that it represents the ‘most liked’ scripts rather than the best ones: it has included such classics as X-Men Origins: Wolverine, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People, and also this piece of shit.

Seeking Justice, renamed Justice in the UK (maybe they were trying to hide all the bad reviews) was originally known as The Hungry Rabbit Jumps for reasons that make only slightly less sense once you’ve sat through the film. It stars Nicolas Cage as a good and honest school teacher who changes inner city kids’ lives by patiently explaining to them that writing poems is better than punching people in the face (this literally happens), until his wife, January Jones from Mad Men, is brutally raped.

At which points he enlists the services of a group of mysterious vigilante men to see some Real Justice like you don’t get now because of political correctness. But, oh no, now King Vigilante Guy Pearce wants a favour in return. A MURDER favour. Of murder.

This is pretty questionable stuff, on a number of levels. I mean: at last a film that deals with the true victims of rape, the husbands! All things considered, it wouldn’t make this much less awful, but you really wouldn’t need to rewrite much of this it make January Jones the protagonist. Plus you wouldn’t have to look at Nicolas Cage’s stupid goatee quite so much.

Then there’s the uncomfortable feeling that the film expects us to at least pause to consider whether the world wouldn’t, in fact, be better with some Real Justice from Real Men. I suppose one, could, if feeling extremely charitable, read some Fight Club-style satire of toxic masculinity into this. But you could also spend that time thinking about literally anything else at all that isn’t this shitty movie.

Because even if you look past this stuff, Seeking Justice is structurally doomed: it is a thriller with no twists. Once the premise is established, everything plays out almost exactly as you would think it would, assuming you’re not watching it thinking, “Promising a favour to the insane vigilantes who are going to murder the guy who raped your wife sounds like an extremely good idea with no possible negative consequences!” There’s basically nowhere for it to go beyond endless running about and shouting.

I mean, running about and shouting can be passably entertaining, especially if Nicolas Cage is in full Nicolas Cage mode, but here he just looks bored. If there was ever a film the demanded a ‘Cage finally loses his shit’ sequence it was this, but Seeking Justice is not prepared to wink at its own ludicrous premise. There’s no hope of actually saving this, so escalate! Make it turn out the whole thing was planned by the President of the USA or that January Jones is a hologram from space. But no, the film just sits there, stony-faced, as though that’ll make it look less stupid. It doesn’t.

Still. There’s a bit with a monster truck show (even if they mainly point the camera at Guy Pearce’s dumb face instead of the monster trucks). Nicolas Cage wears a sparkly silver mask at the beginning. And Harold Perrineau from Lost is in it, so in a pinch you can entertain yourself for literally seconds at a time by shouting “WAAAAALT!” every time he’s onscreen.

THE NUMBERS

1 — The secret code to indicate that Nicolas Cage wants Guy Pearce to murder the rapist is to buy two chocolate bars. Each of them costs him $1. They’re ‘Forever Bars’ which is probably a clever satire about prisons or something.

3 — January Jones is taken to Intensive Care Unit 3.

7 — Nic Cage is told to catch the number 7 bus to school, then get off the bus and murder a dude. He doesn’t murder him but the dude dies in an accident anyway. Oops!

22 — The dude Nic Cage is supposed to murder keeps a boat in a storage unit numbered 22.

37 — The dude Nic Cage is supposed to murder is 37 years old, according to his obituary. He is a journalist, so on some level probably deserved to accidentally fall off a bridge onto motorway.

55 — The package containing Nic Cage’s murder instructions includes a post-it note with the number 504–555–0189 written on it. Phone numbers with the 555 prefix aren’t regularly given out in America so are used in movies to avoid accidentally showing someone’s real phone number and having stupid idiots who watch bad Nic Cage movies ring them to complain or whatever.

THE RESULT

1 number. Where’s my justice for watching this cack, eh readers?

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Nic Cage returns to a franchise for only the second time in his career, for Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

My name is Ed, or at least it used to be until I started watching Nicolas Cage films in an attempt to win the National Lottery. Since then I’ve lost my job, the country voted Brexit, and the Rock and Vin Diesel have fallen out. There are no more certainties.

Trespass is a film about some people who trespass on Nic Cage’s property. I don’t know why it’s called trespass as it’s not like they’re from an anarchic wing of the Rambler’s Association, they also kidnap him and his family and threaten to murder them because they want to steal all his money. It would be more accurate to call this film ‘Guns and Shouting’.

So, right, Nic Cage is an (apparently) absolutely minted diamond dealer who is having MARITAL PROBLEMS causing him not to want to do A SEX on his wife, Nicole Kidman (a stunning performance as ‘very bored actress with a regret’). Meanwhile, their TROUBLESOME TEEN just wants to go to PARTIES. Very RELATABLE. Then a GANG turns up with GUNS and starts SHOUTING. I’ll stop DOING this GIMMICK now.

Anyway, the gang’s plan immediately unravels as a) Nic Cage is a lot less enthusiastic about opening up his safe and giving them all his money than they expected and b) the gang is almost as dysfunctional as the family. “It’s sort of like a cracked mirror, yeah?” says the screenwriter, breathing bits of crisp into your face. One of the trespassers is on TOO MANY drugs! One of the trespassers is on NOT ENOUGH drugs! And NOTHING is as it SEEMS. Okay, I’ll really stop now.

The problem is that there’s nothing here but twist after melodramatic twist. He’s doing that because he thinks she did this. But really she did this because that other guy did that. And he only did that because his cat did, and so on. The closest thing to a saving grace Trespass has is that at a certain point it becomes so convoluted as to be outright laughable. ‘Because everyone lies, right man?’ says the screenwriter, waving an unlit cigarette in your face. But needing an organisational chart to follow the plot of a film is not, as it turns out, a good thing. It’s not even actually that complicated, it’s that each individual part is so dull it’s hard to keep in your head.

Cage seems mainly interested in trying out different ways of doing ‘acting in glasses’ (also ‘acting when you cannot see because you’ve dropped your glasses’). It is not one of his best performances, sticking almost entirely in the mode of strained anger, and at times he appears to be genuinely furious that he’s in the film at all. When, towards the end, he tells Nicole Kidman to let him die so she and the kid get the life insurance, you sort of feel a bit sad that she refuses.

There really is a lot of shouting in it.

THE NUMBERS

3 — There was a delay in production when on August 3rd 2010, Nic Cage allegedly started demanding that he be allowed to switch roles to play the head trespasser, before departing the project entirely to go on holiday. Unfortunately, he returned, and filming resumed.

4 — At the beginning of the film Nic Cage is making a deal involving 4 carat diamonds. A carat is apparently 200 milligrams so why not just say that? Is it because of Big Diamond, who will force me to spend all my lottery money on diamonds for my stupid fictional wife.

10 — The one kidnapper sold out the other one for 10 thousand dollars. I can understand. I would like 10 thousand dollars.

18 — Trespass broke the ‘time from cinema to home video record’, making it to DVD in just 18 days. This knocked the ‘excellent’ American Idol spin-off movie From Justin To Kelly, which had taken a whole 29 days, off the top spot.

24 — Trespass had a total domestic gross of $24,094. On a $35 million budget. Bazinga.

54 — The number plate on Nic Cage’s car is JSG854. I genuinely get a nervous reaction (‘got to write it down, got to write it down’) when I see a number plate in any film or TV show now because of this whole stupid idea.

THE RESULT

Zero return on a £2 investment. Still, at least I didn’t lose millions of quid making this crappy film.

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Seeking Justice or possibly just Justice depending on what country you watch it in.