Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001)
Director: John Madden
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Penelope Cruz, John Hurt
Set in the WWII occupation of a small town in Greece, the titular Captain Correli (Cage) is an Italian Artillery Officer with a love of the opera and a distaste for war. He seeks a peaceful coexistence with the town he's in charge of occupying, engaging in a romance with the daughter (Cruz) of the local doctor. When the Italians surrender, however, the Germans seek to aggressively reoccupy the town and he's forced to defend it. Look, maybe in 2001 people were willing to accept a story like this. A story with a pacifist axis officer, an awkward shy german officer who wants to join in the festivities of the occupied town, a story where that officer, in the middle of the reoccupation, drives off and cries about it. I'm not in the mood for it. There was one bright spot in my experience of watching this movie and an eagle-eyed reader may have caught it already. This movie is directed by John Madden. No, it's not the same John Madden. But someone in the imdb trivia thinks it is, linking to the page for the football legend. Incredible.
Zandalee (1991)
Director: Sam Pillsbury
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Erika Anderson, Judge Reinhold
Set in New Orleans, Thierry Martin (Reinhold) is an effete businessman, a former poet, dealing poorly with the corporate takeover of his family's business when he reunites, by chance, with an old friend, Johnny. Johnny (Cage) is a ball of grease, dirt made flesh. He is a soul patch with a soul patch. The movie would have us believe he is desirable. Thierry's wife, Zandalee (Anderson) is emotionally and sexually frustrated with him and falls into an affair with the passionately artistic and dangerous Johnny. This is the kind of affair that a romance novel will call erotic, destructive, passionate - which is to say, it's largely sexual assault. Thierry is grappling with multiple forms of impotence as his personal and professional lives collapse and he's growing more and more suspicious of his wife's affair. Nothing good happens to the people in this movie and the script does a pretty poor job of framing its thesis. A few things to note on the way out - first, this movie is stacked with talent. Aside from the cast already mentioned, it also features Joe Pantoliano in a prominent role as Zandalee's gay coworker, Marisa Tomei as Johnny's girlfriend, and Steve Buscemi as a completely superfluous comic relief garbage truck worker. Second, search up the dance scene between Cage and Reinhold. It's this tense aggressive waltz, an embodiment of their love triangle, as they dance on the docks of the bayou to a Chere Tout Tout.
Next (2007)
Director: Lee Tamahori
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Julianne Moore, Jessica Biel
Cris Johnson (Cage) has limited precognitive powers which he uses to eke out a living as a Vegas magician and cheating at small stakes gambling to keep his powers unnoticed. When he prevents a shooting in a Casino, he attracts the attention of the FBI (Moore) who needs him to prevent the deployment of a nuclear bomb that went missing from the USSR. He's not interested in getting involved - the excuse being that his powers aren't powerful enough for something of such large scale - but more pertinent is that he's chasing the vision of a woman (Biel) who he sees beyond his normal limitations. Most of the movie is spent evading the FBI and also sometimes the terrorists are trying to kill him, which they only do because the FBI thinks he can stop them. This movie's script is so fucking muddy. It apparently went through a ton of rewrites, the number of bombs and cities involved changed, the terrorists at one point weren't even on screen and it was purely about evading the FBI, it's just very apparent when watching the movie that something happened to it. Despite that, I had a pretty decent time watching it, it's a damn mess but it's one of the more watchable bad movies on this list.
Running With The Devil (2019)
Director: Jason Cabell
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne, Leslie Bibb
Federal agents (Bibb) take notice when a cocaine dealer (Fishburne) starts cutting the supply and people start overdosing, including her own sister. The Boss (Barry Pepper), meanwhile, is interested in not only why it's being cut but why the shipments are getting increasingly light and so he sends one of his other top dealers (Cage) to audit the supply chain, following it each step of the way from Columbia, through Mexico, through the US, and into Canada. This is the fatal flaw of the movie. On its face you have a drama with Cage and Fishburne within the drug trade while a federal agent hunts them down on a mission of vengeance. What we actually have is round about an hour of this movie being spent on a series of barely connected anthology stories of drug mules. There's no drive here, no character arc, nothing to attach to. The characters are all named The Boss, The Man, The Cook, The Executioner, etc, but it doesn't have the punch of the Guy Ritchie movie it wishes it was. This is a Redbox original, and in that sense, it's hitting above its weight, it feels like an actual movie, but boy you don't want to have to qualify in comparison to a movie written and directed by Fred Durst. Fishburne as a sex and drug addicted dealer is pretty good, but Cage is pretty empty in this movie. His character is professional, professorial even, and that's just not a very fun role to watch.
