Well, Nicolas Cage has got two batshit-insane-looking movies coming out — Season of the Witch, which opens today, and Drive Angry 3D, which arrives next month — so it’s time to stop, take a breath, and take a look at his filmography. These days, Cage’s appearance in a movie is a pretty good indicator that something might be off about the film — sometimes gloriously, wonderfully off and sometimes just off-off. So we’ve ranked Cage’s fifteen worst movies (the ones in which he’s the top-billed star that scored below 50 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), and here they are, running the gamut from bad-bad to bad-good to nearly okay.
Two great screamers — Samuel L. Jackson and Nicolas Cage — and one scream-worthy setup: A black businessman tries to walk into his posh new home, the cops show up, and they in turn involve a local crook in the dicey situation to try and cover their tracks. What could possibly go wrong? A lot, it turns out. First of all, it’s an incredibly shrill movie (go figure), but perhaps more important, it isn’t very funny. Like, at all. And, come to think of it, that concept was pretty offensive. But maybe it was a bit ahead of its time: The Nic Cage of that time, despite being widely hailed as an oddball movie star, was far more restrained than the crazy-eyed Cage we know and love today. Maybe he and Jackson should remake it. Okay, pretend you didn’t read that.‬
We’re just going to let Roger Ebert take it away on this one: “It should be preserved by the Library of Congress, as an example of creative desperation. It plays like a documentary about a group of actors forced to perform in a screenplay that contains not one single laugh, or moment of wit, or flash of intelligence.†Oh, okay, one more: Here’s Jon Lovitz himself, from a recent AV Club Interview: “Well, I feel like I’m very fortunate to be in movies at all, but I called it ‘Trapped In Shit.’â€â€¬
The idea of Nicolas Cage playing a powerful magician at war with Evil itself is certainly not a bad one, and he was his usual intense self, but John Turtletaub and Jerry Bruckheimer’s wannabe-tentpole flop muddied the proceedings with too much generic CGI.
We liked the first one, actually, but there was something tired — you could see it in Cage’s eyes — with this bland sequel.
The delirious stylization of John Woo and the delirious stylization of Nicolas Cage were an ideal fit when they worked on Face/Off. (Which was beloved by critics, so it’s not included in this list.) Unfortunately, both of them kept it in their pants for this staid and uninspired prestige war flick.
You’d think Cage as a clairvoyant stage magician with bad hair who is pursued by the FBI would be a no-lose proposition, but you’d be wrong. The actor’s presence in a movie usually promises something unpredictable; here he (and everybody else) just went through the motions.
Back when Nicolas Cage was still known as Academy Award-Winning Actor Nicolas Cage, he made this Oscar-bait period piece romance co-starring then-Weinsteinian-ingenue Penelope Cruz. It looked like fairly harmless stuff, but then Cage opened his mouth and unleashed his nutty Italian-a accent-a!!
It has long been our belief that, like Peter Coyote and John Malkovich before him, Nicolas Cage should make more movies in distant lands for foreign directors — who may be better suited to use his deliciously strange qualities than directors in Hollywood. This film, directed by the Hong Kong-born, Thailand-based Pang Brothers (of The Eye fame), is the closest he has come to fulfilling our vision — but are we being ungrateful when we say we’d hoped this assassin drama would have been a bit more schlocky?
A beyond-stupid action flick that manages to flirt occasionally with being a guilty pleasure. Cage’s amped-up, likable performance is one of the reasons why.
Yes, the movie (and somewhat unlikely hit) is silly, but really, if there’s gonna be a movie about a flaming skeleton biker superhero from Hell, then Nicolas Cage has to be involved. That’s just the way it is.
It was billed at the time as a generic suspense thriller about snuff films, but that was a bit deceptive, like a psychopath pretending to have a job. This was one of the early signs that Nicolas Cage had a future in making surreal unhinged, unintentionally hilarious genre mash-ups. That it was directed by Joel Schumacher just makes its lunacy that much sweeter.
This one has understandably become legendary — to the point where its deranged weirdness now belatedly seems like a stroke of genius. And, truth be told, we kind of can’t stop watching it — it’s the type of movie that reminds you that somewhere out there in the stars is a universe of infinite chaos. Indeed, this was sort of the first time the broader public became aware that Nicolas Cage was something a lot more special than just an Oscar-winning movie star.
People really seem to hate this film, but Cage’s histrionics and Brian De Palma’s wild camera moves were perfect for one another — sort of a junior version of Cage-Woo collaboration Face/Off.
Really, this sci-fi flick looked awful, and the presence of Cage was just a gigantic warning sign — but it was actually pretty okay, in part because of his lead performance. C’mon, he’s a professor of astrophysics who becomes obsessed with numerology, thereby becoming increasingly Nicolas-Cage-like. What’s not to like?
It’s a ridiculous movie that makes The Da Vinci Code look intelligent, but it’s also a perfect example of the non-crazy Cage at his best — a hyper, charming goofball.