Nicolas Cage, the noted madman actor, resident until recently in the Hollywood version of debtor's prison, is free at last. As he told GQ last year, the paycheck from his 2022 quasi-comeback movie, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, enabled him to finally retire the multimillions of dollars of debt that he'd accumulated as a citizen of interest to the IRS and had kept him strapped to a Z-movie hamster wheel for more than a decade. Those were the years of Season of the Witch, Drive Angry, and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance—famously awful movies, especially considering the talent of the Oscar winner whose résumé they defaced. Now, having won back control of his career, Cage said he was determined not to screw it up again. "I'm just going to focus on being extremely selective," he told GQ. "I would like to make every movie as if it were my last."
Unfortunately, something seems to have gone wrong. Sympathy for the Devil, Cage's latest picture, isn't awful, exactly—not in the bold, nutty manner of Drive Angry or Bangkok Dangerous or any of his earlier misfires. Sympathy is worse, in a way—it's dull. Even with Cage decked out in an odd magenta-tinged hairpiece and what looks like a burgundy prom jacket, and giving forth with lines like, "Ever since I was a child, I've had a stuffy nose," the movie never comes alive. The story, with its cryptic structure and colorless dialogue, strives to tantalize (and indeed does have a twist), but for the most part it fends off our interest at every turn.
