Stolen review

Stolen (12A, 96 mins)
Director: Simon West
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Nicolas Cage’s latest cash-in is a howlingly silly crime thriller that sees the once bankable star playing a master thief who ends up in jail after a job gone wrong. Eight years later he’s out and looking to reconnect with his teenage daughter, when his wronged former partner (Josh Lucas) kidnaps her, demanding a share of the missing $10m from their botched heist. Cue multiple scenes of Cage bumbling around New Orleans on Mardi Gras, while a feeble script chucks in body parts from all sorts of sources, from his and director Simon West’s own Con Air to The Fugitive. It’s pretty tired stuff, even though Cage is reasonably watchable and Danny Huston has fun as the Fed on his trail, but Stolen is the kind of film where the audience is always two steps ahead of the writer, and where a man who has been in prison for eight years can work an FBI computer but doesn’t know what sat-nav is.

The Croods review

The Croods (PG, 99 mins)
Directors: Kirk DeMicco,Chris Sanders
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Far from skulking in Pixar’s shadow like they did for most of the Noughties, Dreamworks Animation has upped their game considerably in recent years thanks to the likes of Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon.

But while Pixar have had to face one or two recent blips, Dreamworks have also taken a backwards step with their latest, The Croods, as flat and unengaging an animated comedy as a major production company has made in years.

The Croods of the title are a cave-dwelling prehistoric family in a harsh and unforgiving world, where every day is a struggle to eat and not be eaten. Dad Grug (Nicolas Cage) hammers home the message of danger and how no good can come of anything new, and is obsessed with keeping them all safe in their cave.

Daughter Eep (Emma Stone) is going through a teen rebel stage and longs for some fun, which happens along when she meets Guy (Ryan Reynolds), who claims the world is ending and that they need to get to high ground.

Outwith the setup of a story that’s both strained and lacking in any real hook, many elements seem added at random. When their cave is destroyed the Croods end up in a strange and colourful new world that owes a lot to Avatar, but makes little sense in most other regards.

The voices are lively, which is something, but most decent animations should have the voices as icing rather than the best thing about it. And the animation is stunning, no two ways about it. But there’s never any sense of wonder, despite all the colour and scale and pyrotechnics.

And the largely charmless story is a road to nowhere. Thematically it’s thin, its main concern about parents letting go and kids growing up anything but new. Chaotic, and lacking any immediate appeal from either characters or plot, The Croods is little more than an awful lot of running and bouncing and falling for no real reward.

Justice review

Justice (15, 104 mins)
Director: Roger Donaldson
★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆


The original title of this batty thriller was The Hungry Rabbit Jumps, a coded phrase that crops up early as we open on a man being secretly filmed while being questioned by persons unknown.

Moments later he’s in his car and being pushed off the roof of a car-park by another vehicle, and how these events are connected with husband and wife Will and Laura (Nicolas Cage and January Jones) soon becomes clear.

He’s a New Orleans teacher and she a musician whose lives are turned upside down when Laura is brutally assaulted. Will is approached by someone calling himself Simon (Guy Pearce) who says he’s with an organisation who will “take care” of the problem. After a bit of thought, it’s an offer Will accepts, and sure enough, Laura’s attacker ends up dead, killed by the husband of a previous victim of crime.

But, just like in The Godfather, Will may be called upon by Simon to provide a service, which starts out innocuously enough, just deliveries and observation. But soon he’s being asked to murder a suspected criminal as payback for the service provided for him, and if he refuses, things are likely to turn very nasty indeed for Laura and him.

Vigilantism always makes for an interesting and provocative subject matter, though one that’s rarely treated well by modern movies. But Justice doesn’t really ask any moral questions of the audience, preferring to quickly turn into the usual innocent man wronged tropes.

It also doesn’t take very long at all to go from silly to preposterous. It’s one of those daft thrillers where practically everyone in it is part of a network of operatives, a springboard for moronic twists that provide absolutely no clue just whose side Xander Berkeley’s cop is supposed to be on.

It’s cheap looking and over-egged when it’s being serious, and twee and unconvincing when it’s trying to be a bit lighter, and all you really get in the way of excitement is shady guys watching and doing things unseen and some extremely low rent chases.

Cage in normal guy mode is like Fun Bobby from Friends when he’s sober – just not enjoyable for anyone to be around, and you realise you miss the wacky, off the wall Cage, who at least brings a certain manic energy to films that are invariably rubbish anyway.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice review

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (PG, 109 mins)
Director: Jon Turteltaub

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer’s second fantasy blockbuster of the summer following Prince of Persia is this daft but fun adventure that starts with practically an entire movie’s worth of backstory in a prologue that shows how Balthazar (Nicolas Cage) was once an apprentice of Merlin. His centuries long search for a successor ends in modern day New York where he meets student Dave (Jay Baruchel) whose help he needs to defeat the bad sorcerer (Alfred Molina) who betrayed Merlin. It’s a typically goofy hodgepodge of silly names and cheesy mythology that might have flown in the 80s, often labouring under the misguided notion that any old rubbish with a wizard in it will automatically hoover up the Potter crowd. But slick effects, a nice sense of humour and the always likeable Baruchel keep it just the right side of nonsense.

The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans review

The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans (18, 122 mins)
Director: Werner Herzog

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Bad Lieutenant was a controversial 1992 police drama that starred Harvey Keitel as a thoroughly corrupt and irredeemable cop. Set in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina, this in-name-only follow up is neither sequel nor remake but a crazed beast all of its own that brings in Nicolas Cage as the not so nice officer on the trail of some drug dealers.

For all that he’s addicted to painkillers and $5000 in the hole to his bookie, he still has an instinct for good police work, even if he’s more interested in stealing drugs from suspects and intimidating old ladies than making arrests. Director Werner Herzog is too busy having an enormous giggle to worry overly about an actual plot, which goes out the window fairly early.

Don’t for a minute expect a standard police procedural, not from this star and this director, who wisely realise the only way something this ripe can be justified is if it’s a rip-roaring black comedy. And it certainly is that; lurid, over the top and hilarious as Cage rampages through the city, abusing the guilty and the innocent alike, having more fun than he’s had in years, doing insane brilliantly without going bug-eyed.

What’s most remarkable is that it has the salt not to descend into a morality tale like many similar movies would. Just when you think it can’t get any nuttier, Herzog throws in a point of view shot from an imaginary iguana. And really, the only way it could have been any more demented is if he had reanimated the corpse of Klaus Kinski to play the lead.