OK, here's how you make the perfect Nic Cage movie
Nicolas Cage gets unhinged in the buzziest horror movie of the year. Also, minions and gladiators. It's a week of variety!
It’s not a Nicolas Cage movie, not really
It’s tricky to make a Nicolas Cage movie these days. There’s always the risk that you’ll tumble headlong into the chasm of memes that Cage has created over the last few decades. You could end up becoming the sort of film that only exists in tweets of “what movie is this?” beneath a GIF of Cage’s gurning, screaming face.1 With that in mind, it would be easy to worry about Longlegs, which not only features an outsized Cage performance, but contains one so transformative that it has been hidden from all of the marketing.2
Cage is the film’s titular “killer” — a twisted madman who claims responsibility for family slayings over several decades, despite the fact it’s the father who actually wielded the weapon in each case. When FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) appears to show a preternatural gift for investigative intuition, her boss Carter (Blair Underwood) puts her on the ice-cold Longlegs case. As Harker begins to decode Longlegs’ cryptic missives to police, she gets very close to the truth indeed.
The genius of Longlegs is in how it provides the perfect, fertile ground for Cage’s performance to grow. It’s a film that is quiet, gritty and visually austere, dealing in the grounded brutality of an FBI procedural. In this context, Cage’s theatrics are deeply unsettling. It’s like he has been parachuted in from a different world, and that only makes him scarier. Initially, there’s a peekaboo quality to our half-glimpses of Longlegs, but there’s no ballyhoo to the eventual reveal. He simply wanders into shot like he’s always been there — and in a way he has.
It’s all part of the deeply evil energy that sits at the heart of Longlegs. Writer-director Osgood Perkins has clearly been inspired by David Fincher’s serial killer classics Seven and Zodiac, with the former in particular inspiring the bleak void at the heart of the narrative. Something about Longlegs feels as forbidden and satanic as the characters’ occult interests, like it’s cracked open a door to let pure darkness leak out into the world — Perkins’ achingly slow aspect ratio shifts suggest a bleeding between past and present and dimension to dimension.
With all of this madness going on, the movie needs a firm centre. That’s where Maika Monroe — beloved by horror fans for the likes of It Follows and The Guest — comes in. It’s a very different performance from her, playing a woman who’s unmoored from the world but doesn’t know why. There’s something of Kristen Stewart to the way she approaches social interactions with terrified timidity, delivering every line like she’s just accidentally bumped someone in a train carriage.
But this is exactly what the film needs. Monroe’s performance seems to carry the horrible weight of inevitability. From the moment she first looks at the cipher in Longlegs’ letters, something deep within her knows where this will end. She knows she’ll find him. She knows she’ll face him. She knows it won’t give her any sense of satisfaction.
In the world of clowning, performers talk about the principle of polarity. The more serious an authority figure is, the more ludicrous the clown must be. When I spoke to clown training expert Vivian Gladwell for a piece about professional wrestling a few years ago, he explained this principle in a way that I thought about in the immediate aftermath of Longlegs.
“In clowning, your power doesn’t necessarily come from you. It comes from the way your partners play with you. In other words, the performance is basically a collaboration rather than ‘I am the biggest and the strongest.’ It’s a collaborative art and you agree to play those roles. We call it the principle of polarity. You have to go either very strong or very weak. A lot of comedy is based on pushing extreme polarities like that.”
Cage and Monroe provide this polarity for each other in Longlegs. Monroe’s quiet seriousness opens the door for Cage’s pantomime theatrics and vice versa. The showdown between them, when it comes, is a masterful set piece that has the power to chill and shock in equal measure, helped by the film’s carefully deployed undercurrent of pitch-black humour. The way Cage’s performance shifts and mutates in this scene is as mercurially masterful as anything he’s ever done on screen.
The sheer force of Perkins’ tone holds the movie together for its atmospheric first half, but there’s no denying that it has been more divisive in terms of what happens when the pieces start to click together. Perkins takes some bold swings into supernatural hokum, but that polarity principle works to hold everything in place. The characters take everything completely seriously, and so we do too.
Of course, the eventual wrap-up of everything isn’t entirely satisfying, but very few of these things are. The journey is almost always better than the destination and, when the journey conjures up this level of dread, it’s difficult to quibble too much with the slightly rushed final movement.
Longlegs shapes up as an homage to Fincher with supernatural inflections, but emerges as something entirely its own. Perkins delivers a cine-literate, self-aware, and blackly comic procedural that is anchored in place by two pillars — Monroe’s stoic cop and Cage’s florid serial killer with a truly unforgettable look and a penchant for the music of T-Rex. He’s the latest director to discover how to make a Nicolas Cage movie for the modern era. He doesn’t ignore Cage’s infamy; he embraces it in all of its Nouveau Shamanic chaos.
Longlegs is in UK cinemas now.
Is cinematic slop always bad?
There aren’t many things that can match the fierce cultural stranglehold of the minions. Beloved by children, ironic suit-wearing teenagers, and Facebook mums, they’re one of the defining pop cultural creations of the 21st century. So we know that Despicable Me 4 is odds-on to follow Inside Out 2 into the billion-dollar box office club. But is it actually good?
This time around, Gru (Steve Carell) and his family have to go into hiding when formidable villain Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell) escapes custody. Maxime has a ludicrous French accent and also a slightly disturbing affection for cockroaches, because why have one quirk when you can have two? Beyond that, everything just goes through the motions.
It’s slop, for sure. But when slop is this well-executed, it’s still great fun. You wouldn’t want every movie to be like this, but it’s fine if some of them are. This is a triumph for silly voices and route one slapstick. It’s a movie that’s far better when it’s slapping a minion on the butt and giggling than it is when it’s trying to do blockbuster action sequences or delivering some weirdly small-c conservative “parent jokes”3.
Some of the ideas work well — Gru’s relationship with his infant son — and some of them fall completely flat — minions turned into superheroes with a special serum. But ultimately, you get laughs, you get a bit of heart, and you get a climactic musical number with some crowd-pleasing cameos for franchise fans. What more do you want from a Despicable Me film?
Despicable Me 4 is in UK cinemas now.
Slasher threequel fails to take it to the MaXXX
Ti West’s X trilogy isn’t like most trilogies. For starters, it’s all in the wrong order, with the 70s-set X followed by the 1910s prequel Pearl and everything concluding with a journey into 80s LA for MaXXXine. All three movies, though, are linked by the ever-changing presence of the increasingly undeniable Mia Goth, playing the characters of both Maxine and Pearl.
In MaXXXine, she’s the sole survivor of the farmhouse massacre from X and has moved to LA. After a successful career in porn, she’s hoping to transition into more conventional acting with a scream queen role in a horror sequel, directed by the ice-cool Elizabeth (Elizabeth Debicki). But soon, a mysterious private detective (Kevin Bacon4) shows up and threatens to reveal all of Maxine’s dark secrets to the world.
It’s a thin plot, but that’s true of the other films in the series too. The reason MaXXXine is by far the weakest of the three is quite simply that its characters are much less intriguing and its genre homage doesn’t land as hard. While X relished the scuzzy exploitation feel of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Pearl is as much indebted to The Wizard of Oz as it is to horror, MaXXXine is the sort of giallo-infused exercise in 80s-set style over substance that we’ve seen a million times before. There have been points during the last decade when it has virtually felt like Hollywood’s default approach. Thanks, Stranger Things!
This time around, MaXXXine wears its time period and genre like an accessory rather than an intrinsic part of its DNA. West’s script weaves the real crimes of the Night Stalker into the backdrop of the story, only to use it as perfunctory window dressing, while the contrast between the “film sets” of X and MaXXXine is entirely unexplored in favour of a half-baked detective story in which there are loads of detectives (Michelle Monaghan and Bobby Cannavale are there, as well as Bacon) and very little story.
Goth, of course, gives it both barrels as Maxine — a swaggering woman who wears the confidence of someone who stared her own death in the face and twatted it with an axe. She’s defiant and fascinating, with Goth’s southern drawl radiating try-hard braggadocio and concealed imposter syndrome, but her character is poorly-defined at the centre of a narrative that never seems to focus itself upon her. We know she’s the star, but the film doesn’t seem convinced.
There’s joy to be found in the splatter, of course, and West’s affection for classic horror is written all over every frame. But there’s a sense here that it’s a step too far for the trilogy, leaving its bones on the screen without any sort of meat beyond simply pointing the camera at neon signs and black gloves. Look, it’s the 80s!
MaXXXine is in UK cinemas now.
Carriage of carnage
The title card for the movie Kill doesn’t arrive until around 45 minutes into the movie. It’s not as if we’ve had to wait that long for stuff to happen, though. By this point, we’ve had romance, heartbreak, flying fists, slashing blades, and enough gore to make even a hardened horror fan lose their lunch. But that title card is a line in the sand. A mission statement. From this point on, the stakes are mortal.
In the 1990s, before his Hindi-language filmmaking career began, writer-director Nikhil Nagesh Bhat was on a train that got robbed. He has now parlayed that trauma into this story, in which a gang of train-hijacking bandits — there’s about 50 of them, for body count purposes — invade the carriages of a service bound for New Delhi. They don’t reckon with the fact that army commando Amrit (Lakshya) and his forbidden lover Tulika (Tanya Maniktala) are aboard.
Kill has been sold as a non-stop action freakout and nobody going in with that expectation will be underwhelmed. It’s a rapid-fire ride of close-quarters combat in cramped corridors and various vestibules. There are punches, kicks, shootings, bludgeonings, and more stabbings than a pin cushion factory.
And for the most part, it’s a tonne of fun. Bhat makes some impressively brutal decisions and is inventive enough to make sure there’s real variety in the fight sequences — watch out for a truly horrific use of lighter fluid — despite the limited environment. However, there’s an empty void where the characters should be, with the central thrust of Amrit’s increasingly desperate sadism somewhat under-cooked.
But let’s face it, we’re all here for the bloodshed. And in that respect, Kill more than delivers on its promise.
Kill is in UK cinemas now.
Trailer of the Week: Gladiator II
There were some question marks about whether a Gladiator sequel would work without the twin star power of Russell Crowe and Joaquin Phoenix. But Ridley Scott, despite closing in on his 90th birthday, has blown everybody’s fears away with the first look at Gladiator II.
Paul Mescal and his biceps/thighs are, of course, the stars of the show, but the presence of Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, and a cackling Joseph Quinn do plenty to enhance the epic vibe. Then there’s everything else. We’ve got huge battles5, formidable opponents, and plenty of political scheming. Nobody does epic like Ridley. Age be damned!
Gladiator II will be released in UK cinemas on 15th November.
Next week: The 90s are back back back as Twisters swirls menacingly into cinemas, powered by the coolest movie stars around today.
Mandy is a prime example of the sort of film that fell into this chasm. It’s a stranger and more interesting film than most, but is now best remembered for this shot and this clip — both of which have more to them in context than they do as memes. The movie has now been completely swallowed up into the vortex of “Cage rage” memes.
It’s one of the best viral marketing campaigns in years, as I wrote about for Yahoo recently. And it seems to have worked. My Friday night screening was packed and I’ve seen lots of similar accounts on social media. These box office numbers could be very healthy indeed.
There are gags about non-dairy milks and those gosh-darn self-service petrol station machines that feel catapulted from your dad’s favourite Netflix special.
Delivering a real “hold my beer” accent challenge to Daniel Craig ahead of the third Knives Out movie.