Cage Match: 211

Cage Match is an ongoing look at the direct to DTV works of Nicolas Cage. I'll watch them, review them and rank them so we can determine what reigns supreme in this era of Cage.

What’s Cage up to this time?

Cage is a cop! This is something I figured I would have seen a lot more of up until now. Cage is Officer Mike Chandler. He’s a cop. He might retire soon. He has a daughter and at one point had a wife. He gets caught in a shoot-out. One time he looks sad. That’s about all there is to say about Ole Mikey Chandler.

 Who else is in the cage?

I will be honest and say that I recognized nobody else in this one. I looked it up and I see that Michael Rainey Jr. was in that show Power that I think people liked. It also looks like Sophie Skelton, who plays the daughter, is on Outlander, and I KNOW people like that show. So, there’s some pedigree here I guess.

The director is York Alec Shackleton who would go on to direct a really shitty Guy Pearce movie called Disturbing the Peace. It seems like we may have put a stop to him after that. This is the writer’s only credit so we definitely put a stop to him.

Is the movie worthy of Cage?

Not…really. I see what it was going for, but it fails pretty spectacularly.

The first act of the movie sets up a surprising amount of characters. We have our antagonists, a group of mercenaries who haven’t been paid for their work. They discover they money they are owed has been distributed to a number of banks, so they decide they better rob these banks. The movie is focused on their attempt to rob a bank in the small (at least I think it’s supposed to be small) town of Chesterford. There’s no development on any of these guys aside from “we want money, shoot shoot shoot!”

On the good guy side, there is a ton going on. We have Chandler, a near retiree who has an estranged relationship with his daughter even though his partner is also her husband. His wife also somewhat recently passed away which is partly why his relationship with his daughter isn’t great. All of this information is delivered in the most surface level “nobody would ever talk like this” conversation between the daughter and her husband. I’m not saying their names because it really doesn’t matter.

We also have Kenny, a boy who is bullied at school and one day fights back. This gets him in trouble and the school says he has to either go along with the police for a ride along or face expulsion. I’ll give you one guess as to whether or not he’s doing the ride along when the cops confront the bank robbers. Kenny’s mom is also a surgeon at the hospital where victims of the robbery end up. I think we’re also supposed to be getting to know some of the other cops on the force, but it’s really hard to tell.

So, the movie spends a while introducing these characters and about halfway through the movie decides “fuck it, gun fight!” I guess the gun fight is supposed to be more impactful because we’ve learned to love and appreciate these characters, but the problem is that is not in any way true. These are nothing characters we know next to nothing about which makes it real hard to care if anything happens to them during the shoot-out that takes over the entire back half of the movie.

This wouldn’t be so bad if at least that back half was exciting, but it’s not. It’s fine, but the action is shot in a way that gets repetitive real fast. There are people on two sides and they take turns popping out from behind cover, shooting a bunch, and then going back down behind cover. That’s it.

211 doesn’t work as drama or an action movie. It’s not a terrible movie, but it gives you almost nothing to be excited about. It moves along from point a to point b, content to coast by with as little effort as possible. There’s really no reason to watch this one.

How Cage-y is Cage?

Not at all. I think he raises his voice once but other than that this is a very unenthusiastic performance. I’m starting to think Cage isn’t capable of a flat-out bad performance, but this one isn’t him giving it his all and I don’t blame him. There’s nothing to work with.

You bought the blu-ray?! Are there bonus features at least?!

There is a shockingly large amount of them. In fact, the cast and crew interviews here are slightly longer than the movie itself. Most of them aren’t terribly interesting but there’s definitely a few good tidbits here and there that shine a light on how this movie came to be.

-        Nic Cage says he did this movie because he has a relationship with Millennium Pictures, one of the studios behind it. He doesn’t say he loved the script or wanted to work with the director or anything like that. It really just sounds like “I’m under contract and I don’t know.”

-        The writer admits that he tried to put together a script that ticked off as many “popular things” boxes as possible to get the widest audience he could. So it wasn’t written because of a passion for the material or because there was a story he really needed to get out into the world. It was written to try and make money. As the classic saying goes, it tries to be for everybody and as a result ends up being for nobody.

Should you get into this cage?

I can’t think of a single logical reason why you should. It’s a perfectly serviceable movie overall that excels at absolutely nothing. I wasn’t that surprised to hear that it was put together to make a few quick bucks, rather then because it was something that people truly wanted to make.

Where does it rank?

Right near the bottom! I can’t put it below Outcast or Left Behind as they were outright bad, but it still gets the privilege of hanging with their kind.

Mandy
Mom and Dad
Rage
Arsenal
Vengeance: A Love Story
Running with the Devil
Seeking Justice
Primal
Pay the Ghost
211
Outcast
Left Behind

Follow Shaun on Twitter @still_like_this and Instagram @likethispodcast