I don’t know whether Nicolas Cage has financial difficulties, but he doesn’t seem to be as picky as usual. In Trespass, which has been released straight to “Video on Demand” in the United States, he plays Kyle Miller, a diamond merchant who is the victim of a home invasion. It isn’t much of a stretch. The showy role is given to the lead housebreaker, who out-Cages Nic Cage. For his part, the star of the recent remake of Bad Lieutenant and Kick Ass gets one speech where he tells the robbers that they’ve hit the mother lode, but essentially he’s in lockdown.
You’ve also got to pity Nicole Kidman, who plays his trophy wife, Sarah. I thought she gave up roles like this in the 1990s. She is a mother who cannot communicate with her teenage daughter, Avery (Liana Liberato), or her husband, with whom she enjoys the minimum of intimacy. Sarah appears to have no social life either. Kyle tells her about the cigarettes and lighter that he found by the pool, but she seems nonplussed. They actually belong to
one of the robbers, a psycho who, predictably, has not been taking his medication.
On a minute-by-minute basis, director Joel Schumacher maintains a fair amount of tension. Karl Gajdusek’s screenplay appears to want to say something about upwardly mobile couples who have tied all their assets up in property. Ultimately, it boils down to a fire and judicious use of a staple gun, with a wounded Kyle roaring: “Stay away from my family”.
It’s fairly nonsensical. Kyle lets in robbers dressed as cops who want to talk to him about “a spate of robberies in the area” without noticing that he cannot see their faces, not even consulting the multiple cameras.
Avery sneaks out of the house to go to a party and then back in without hearing the commotion. Kyle employs a stalling tactic – “Who’s cutting your diamonds?” – that makes no sense when we see the contents of the safe.
The shock is that no sooner has this film been released than Cage has another one-word title B-movie out, Justice, about a guy caught up in vigilante action. Enough. He should save us
from these movies and get a better accountant.
With 50/50, formerly known as I’m with Cancer, you can tick off the formulaic movie beats. Scripted by Will Reiser and apparently based on his own cancer treatment, it works, but you feel after 100 minutes that all it did was stick to the road, doing 30 miles an hour. There is no inspiration here.
Our hero is Portland-based radio producer Adam Lerner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who lives miles away from his office and never learned to drive. Dependent in different ways on best buddy Kyle (Seth Rogen) and his action-painter artist girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard), Adam discovers that he is practically spineless. He has cancer of the spine which is, we are told, kind of rare, but perfectly contrived as a movie metaphor.
Films of this sort have a learning curve. Through the course of chemotherapy, Adam, as Americans say, grows a set of balls. He dumps his cheating girlfriend, appreciates his mother (Anjelica Huston) and gets a perky new lover (Anna Kendrick), who is his therapist and has a real job.
OK, in the fourth act, one of the guys on the cancer ward dies. But it’s the fourth act – someone’s got to die. Also, Adam finally gets behind the wheel of a large automobile (quote from Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” intended).
The best thing about the movie is Seth Rogen, cast as the vaguely disreputable Kyle, who uses Adam’s condition as a means of meeting girls. Adam discovers that Kyle is a good guy after all when he discovers a book on cancer in his apartment filled with Post-It notes marking relevant tips.
The second best thing is the likeable Anna Kendrick, who plays the therapist with a minimal back story who is really only there to be replacement girl. You recognise the contrivance but Kendrick is playing such a positive character, always wanting to do the most suitable thing but lacking the people skills to do so, that you get seduced by such a wish-fulfilment character.
Overall, there’s nothing profound or daring about 50/50, directed by Jonathan Levine, hitherto known for The Wackness. If it had been given its proper title, “Grow a Ballsack”, it would have seemed less of a cheat.
