Having gotten caught up again on Nicolas Cage films with
Grand Isle, I have finally completed my review and ranking of every Cage film. Films are ranked with equal value given to objective quality and the
Cage Gauge, which is a measurement of how much Cage is in the movie, how well he acts, how crazy he acts, and how weird things are in general. Each film is accompanied by its year of release and rotten tomatoes score. This is a LONG article, so I’ll be posting about 10 a day.
Not featured are
Best of Times (TV movie that was really just a failed pilot for a variety show, but you can youtube a pretty good monologue Cage has),
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (decent movie but his very minor character doesn't even get a name),
Industrial Symphony No. 1 (David Lynch roped Cage and Laura Dern into filming an introduction for this concert during the production of
Wild at Heart),
Grindhouse (Fake trailer between two movies, but well worth checking out),
Dark (Just a director's cut of
Dying of the Light, which is not a movie I care to watch again), or
Love, Antosha (documentary Cage narrates).
91. Left Behind (2014) 1%
Nicolas Cage has two films on the IMDb’s bottom 100 list, so it makes sense that one of the two would be here at the bottom.
Left Behind’s second take on an adaptation of the book series about the rapture was so dull that even critics tied to Christian publications slammed it, with Christianity Today saying they “tried to give the film zero stars, but our tech system won't allow it.”
No one was hopeful that this film would be good, but Cage fans actually kept an eye on this one as the story of a plane that loses half its passengers mid-flight could make for some campy fun. However, Cage isn’t even in this movie much as it bounces around between plots that are never very fleshed out.
90. Christmas Carol: The Movie (2001) 17%
At the height of his career Nicolas Cage actually managed to star in one of his absolute worst films, and it’s a real feat on director Jimmy T. Murakami’s part that he could adapt
A Christmas Carol so poorly that it’s the second worst Cage film. Allegedly a good animator (having previously made
When the Wind Blows), something must have really went wrong here. This version is heavily embellished, fleshing out a variety of characters and adding unnecessary characters, like not one, but two cartoon mice, and villains that aren’t offered the same chance at redemption that Scrooge gets, undercutting the story. Scrooge is also much younger so that he can be reunited with Belle at the end. The film may have gotten away with these things if it didn’t look absolutely atrocious and have zero energy, but you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was a college project. None of this is Cage’s fault obviously. A casual viewer probably wouldn’t even identify him in his small role as Jacob Marley.
89. USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage (2016) 17%
You would be forgiven for thinking that
USS Indianapolis was a completely foreign made film. Or maybe I just want to excuse the fact that I did for the longest time. Anyway, this is not a good film. The staggeringly high 17% of critics who gave this film a fresh score can basically be summarized as saying “it’s a true World War II story and no one else was telling it.” I think we could have waited another 71 years and spared ourselves such a poorly made ripoff of
Jaws.
The film does have some great campy moments, like when the Japanese submarine captain’s ghost father tells him that he brings dishonor upon his family for not killing more people. But none of these fun scenes involve Cage himself, as his acting what was at the height of what we call the “Xanax era”.
88. The Humanity Bureau (2017) 25%
A “science-fiction” film wherein Cage plays a government agent totally not in charge of turning poor people into soylent green (spoilers!). This time we’re ripping off
Logan, so due to a minor bureaucratic red flag, Cage has to take his secret son to Canada while being chased by Nick from
Left 4 Dead 2. I put science-fiction in quotes before because the only thing you need to portray a dystopian future is shots of low-income housing in desert climates. LARPing in abandoned warehouses might have worked for
Stalker, but surprisingly we don’t end up with the same level of artistic expression here.
87. The Boy in Blue (1986) 44%
Cage’s career wouldn’t be a perfect curve if he wasn’t in some really bad movies before he became famous, but don’t worry, he has us covered. By the way, this was the hardest movie for me to obtain by some margin. I paid quite a bit for a DVD after failing to get top bid on eBay twice and plenty of waiting in between. When I watched what felt like a small Canadian made-for-TV movie, I understood why.
The Boy in Blue is the real life story of Canadian sculler Ned Hanlan. You probably don’t know about Ned Hanlan because you probably don’t know what a sculler is unless you watched
The Social Network. That obscurity would be okay if this was remotely a good sports movie, but it’s not. There’s no tension in any sport scenes as we see shots of Ned rowing, his opponents rowing, and then we’re told that Ned is rowing faster. The film largely takes place before Hanlan’s career, so instead of seeing him compete at the world stage, we’re seeing petty dramas that were invented for the film.
Cage does a lot of heavy lifting in his films, but this time he does it literally. It’s obvious that he was only selected for this movie because at the time he was quite muscular and handsome. He brings nothing else to the role and it really stands out as one of his worst performances ever. Word is he got an obscene tattoo put on his back to prevent this kind of casting in the future.
86. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) 28%
The most infamous film from the height of Cage’s career, where he plays a fascist army captain. But he’s not one of those bad German fascists, he’s a good Italian fascist. And instead of oppressing the Greek island he’s taken control of with violence, he oppresses them with really awful singing.
Perhaps you’ve already spotted the problem with this film. Nicolas Cage is woefully cast as an Italian man and Penélope Cruz isn’t a much better Greek. Cage’s greatest strength as an actor is that he has more conviction than any other, more than any sane actor who would care about their image and their career. His greatest weakness however is with accents. But perhaps he disagrees, after all, he just keeps doing them, and this was one of his worst.
85. Bangkok Dangerous (2008) 8%
2008 was the height of Cage’s infamy. A friend and I would joke about seeing this movie, but we wouldn’t have gotten much out of it. A remake of 1999’s
Bangkok Dangerous and directed by the same pair of twins,
Bangkok Dangerous wasn’t a cynical remake, just a really bad one nonetheless. Cage plays a hitman in Bangkok who shouldn’t start personal relationships because it’s bad for a hitman to do, he does so anyway, and the results are predictable and tedious.
The gimmick of the original film was that the hitman was deaf, which made him fearless. The Pang brothers abandoned this gimmick because they would need to give an actor like Nicolas Cage some good lines. They didn’t.
84. Running with the Devil (2019) 22%
2019, if not overwhelming, had been so very consistent for Cage until I saw this movie. I suppose it’s ambitious in its attempt to create a Martin McDonagh style tableau of characters, the writer/director just forget to put any actual characters in it. This makes following the plot (something about drug running) almost impossible. I literally finished the film five minutes ago and it was a tough choice to decide whether to watch it again to give it a more fair review (but really, not such a tough choice). It isn’t bad in the sense that a lot of these bottom feeders are. It feels like a pretty straight-laced Hollywood movie with professional actors, and Laurence Fishburn in particular does a fine job. Cage on the other hand is barely present in physicality or spirit.
83. Inconceivable (2017) 31%
Challenge: watch the whole movie without thinking about Wallace Shawn in
The Princess Bride.
Inconceivable isn’t just an edgy word for a video on demand B movie, it’s actually really on the nose about the plot. This is a pregnancy thriller. It stars Gina Gershon and Nicky Whelan, both of whom had worked with Nicolas Cage before. A new woman in town is trying to escape an abusive past and ends up befriending a couple, but something doesn’t seem right.
Though a bad movie, the plot and twists are ludicrous enough that it might have ranked higher on this list, but it’s a pregnancy film starring women, and Nicolas Cage exists only to be an authority figure that shows up here and there.
82. Outcast (2014) 5%
I unironically love these crappy Chinese historical films with random European characters.
Dragon Blade,
The Great Wall, perhaps even counting
The Forbidden Kingdom (which also stars Liu Yifei). So I was delighted to learn that Nicolas Cage was in such a film. And then distraught to learn that it actually stars Hayden Christensen. The plot opens suspiciously similarly to
Season of the Witch as well. Two crusaders ditch the crusades, only this time they both separately end up in China somehow where they must protect a prince from his evil brother. They fight the brother outside of a cave and that’s pretty much all that happens. There isn’t even any good action.
Cage is a minor character here, but his performance is at least unique in how terrible it is. I suspect he’s supposed to be Scottish, but all I’m certain of is that he shouts and growls a lot. You might think that could make the movie worth watching for a true Cage fan, but Hayden Christensen’s performance is somehow actually worse. Look, I really hate Hayden Christensen as an actor and I don’t think that’s too spicy a hot take for this early in the list.
81. 211 (2018) 5%
This is a movie about a bank robbery that happens while a police officer (Cage) is in the middle of a scared-straight ride-along. So it’s a bit surprising when the film opens with terrorist activity in Afghanistan. When a group of mercenaries don’t get paid for a job, they hatch a scheme to get their money back: rob literally any bank. Unfortunately for them, outside of
Grand Theft Auto, being really good at killing people doesn’t make you any good at getting away with bank robbery. This is a film that fails on every level. I might have said it was an okay action movie until one robber evades bullets by zig-zagging.
But on the other hand, it’s our first movie where Nicolas Cage neither has a small role nor does a bad job. I can’t say he did a great job, because the rest of the acting is so incredibly poor he may just look good in comparison, but he’s definitely trying, even shedding some tears over his fallen coworkers. Unfortunately, while the honest cop is a staple Cage role, it’s also easily his worst.