Moonstruck (1987)
Director: Norman Jewison
Starring: Cher, Nicolas Cage, Olympia Dukakis
This was an extremely fun movie! Loretta Castorini (Cher) lives in a family home in Little Italy with her parents Rose (Dukakis) and Cosmo (Vincent Gardenia). She's a middle-aged widow who has given up on marrying for love and is settling for a marriage of companionship to Jonny Cammereri (Danny Aiello). He's a bit of a goofus, but a nice guy. Before the marriage, he has to travel home to the Old Country to be with his dying mother. In the meantime, he requests that Loretta invite his estranged brother Ronny (Cage) to their wedding so they can make amends. Ronny works the ovens at a local bakery after an accident in which his hand was maimed and he has not taken to that life change well. He is, naturally, the love interest, but we'll not be getting into that. The main romance isn't very believable or fleshed out but the movie gets away with it by spending its time elsewhere, on other relationships. Loretta's father is cheating on her mother with a much younger woman. We spend time with them. Her mother suspects it - we spend time with her as she grapples with how to feel about it, as she goes to dinner alone knowing her husband is out on the town with another woman. We get small peeks into the life of some family friends who run the neighborhood grocery. We spend time with Feodor, Loretta's grandfather, who spends most of his time taking care of a swarm of dogs. The romance itself isn't a focus so much as it is another view of what companionship can look like. All that being said - the reason we're here is Olympia Dukakis, the mother. She is hysterical. She is the best part of this movie by far, absolutely carries the movie on her back from the first scene she's in. Cage is fine here. He's got a big flamboyant speech early on that he nails in typical exaggerated Cage fashion but the role doesn't ask for much. He's brooding and greasy and becomes affable and greasy, it works. I recommend this one, it's a good time.
Windtalkers (2002)
Director: John Woo
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Adam Beach, Peter Stormare
It's 1941. Joe Enders (Cage) fakes his way out of rehabilitation to rejoin the war effort on the Pacific Front. He is assigned an important task; the military is deploying new radio men on the next mission, two Navajo code talkers. His mission is to escort Private Yahzee (Beach) to ensure his safety or, failing that, kill him to ensure the code's. Enders, already in an unhealthy mental state, reacts to these orders by maintaining an emotional distance. Mirroring these two are Henderson (Christian Slater) and Whitehorse (Roger Willie) who have a much more positive relationship; these two relationships are the intended focus of the movie, and that's also where it falls apart. Woo was famously upset at the script rewrites the pulled the movie away from this direction and more toward a typical war film. There's a lot to like about Windtalkers but it is often in the imagining of what it wants to be, rather than what it actually is. You can see on screen where the movie is compromised by the year it was released. It is a WWII film that feels like a Vietnam war film with the explicit statement that the enemies of today could be the allies of tomorrow, that you should treat each other as humans. This was a pretty difficult message to put on American screens in 2002 - it was intended for November 2001. Overall, I think the movie works despite its flaws, I think a critical viewer will see the characters shine through the explosions and appreciate what it's trying to say in the historical context of the moment. I think the performances are strong across the board and if this movie had come out at any other time in American history it would have made a much stronger impact.
Jiu Jitsu (2020)
Director: Dimitri Logothetis
Starring: Alain Moussi, Nicolas Cage, Raymond Pinharry
For thousands of years, the Warrior of Death has come to a remote island on Earth to seek battle, to hone its skills in honorable combat. Every 6 years this desire must be met lest it sate its battle-lust on the world at large. Shortly after fleeing one such battle, we open with our protagonist, Jake (Moussi) having suffered a rock-based amnesia, quite convenient for meting out the mystery of this dogshit plot. The US military is here under false pretenses, there's a mysterious taskforce of martial artists who have taken it upon themselves to combat the invading alien. Nicolas Cage is here, he's one of them, here to collect 1/5th of the movie's budget for a few days work. Tony Jaa is here, he's one of them too, presumably another large chunk of the movie's budget. The alien, Brax, is The Predator but if The Predator was on screen like, all the time, and instead of a wild rubber alien suit with dreadlocks and big mandibles it was a guy in a cheap outfit they'd have a sentai goon wear. Moussi is the lead actor from the Kickboxer reboots, Brax is a stuntman in a suit - there aren't actors in this movie, it's all just directly casting stunt artists. You'd think, then, that at least the fights would be good, that the choreography would be interesting. It's not - even Tony Jaa's sequences are shot and especially cut poorly. Like, you're supposed to edit the part where they take care to not hurt each other. The most notable action sequence is early on when they go Hardcore Henry for a few minutes with first person punching and kicking. This movie is like if you took the Mortal Kombat movies and threw the Predator in there as the antagonist, except that might be better. This was, at time of screening, the worst movie I had watched this year. I can't imagine a world where it's not at the bottom of the Cage List.
Outcast (2014)
Director: Nick Powell
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Hayden Christensen, Alexandre Bailly*
It is the 13th century. After decades of conquest, the king of China, dying, names as heir to the throne his youngest son, the book-learned Zhao (Bill Si Jiahang) rather than his older son Shing (Andy On), the warrior, to oversee an era of peace. A power struggle ensues and Zhao must flee with his sister, Lian (Yifei Liu). In a moment of crisis, they are saved by Jacob (Christensen), a mysterious foreigner. He takes up job of escorting them to the city of the country's generals, where the young boy will undergo the ceremony to become the new king, fleeing the pursuit of his power hungry older brother. It's not a complicated story and it becomes even less complicated as the movie runs out of screentime. Jacob and Gallain (Cage) have journeyed to the East to flee the sins of the Crusades, to drown themselves in opium and alcohol, suppressing the ghosts that haunt them - "The blood we spill here is on our blades, our souls, not God's". But maybe, perhaps, in the innocence of a child, god may etc etc, we get it, right? So the movie's not good. But my standards are really low right now. Hayden Christensen is stiff and uninterested, forgiven only by the fact that his character spends 95% of the movie either blitzed out, in withdrawal, and / or stabbed. Cage, as the older mentor figure who finds himself as a Mountain-living drunken outlaw, is some sort of Scottish but drifts his way in and around Pirate. You don't need to watch this movie. HOWEVER - The action scenes are competent. The set design, the costumes, the lighting - the production is good, it looks like a movie. Jiu Jitsu looked like a show I might see at 3am on the Sci-Fi network. This is, at the very least, a movie. It's not terrible.
* Hey IMDB, Alexandre Bailly, not pictured, is credited as "Crusader A" and yet given third billing on your website. Are you that unwilling to list the primary Chinese cast? You did this with Tony Jaa in the last movie - Raymond Pinharry is listed as "Fisherman". I get that this is probably autogenerated or something but you should be doing better than this, these are notable actors. Yifei Liu went on to be Disney's fucking Mulan, put her name on your website.
