Wicker man wicked bad

Time for Cage, LaBute to be caged, given boot

BOB KOTYK

Over the last ten years, Nicholas Cage has become so consistent a participant in such rank, disposable crap that it’s become difficult to consider him even a “wasted talent” along the lines of Robert DeNiro or other stars who exhibited early promise but have failed to dig themselves out of a prolonged slump.

Following a brief, glorious return to form with his double role in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation, Cage has appeared in a plethora of mediocre films too numerous to list and too forgettable to bother. And though his appearances in more offbeat pictures have sometimes led to semiinspired results (Matchstick Men?), his early success in the late nineties with such action-adventure fare as Con Air and The Rock has him returning to similar projects as his bread-and-butter genre, to the point that his Oscar®- approved credibility had completely evaporated by the early 2000s in what seemed like even less than 60 seconds. Cage no longer brings the quirky energy to his roles that he did in Leaving Las Vegas or Raising Arizona. He’s become part of the scenery now: a tarnished, utterly conventional lead. He’s John Travolta. Or, worse yet, Harrison Ford.

Cage’s new film, The Wicker Man, has him paired with director and playwright Neil LaBute (Nurse Betty, In the Company of Men) to face off against the members of a commune on a mysterious island where matriarchy rules and where men are treated as nothing more than mute drones. Cage plays Edward Malus, an earnest sheriff who embarks on an investigation into the disappearance of his ex-fiancee’s child, Rowan, who he thinks is being held captive on the island but whose existence everyone else denies.

The Wicker Man is billed as a horror film, but there are so few scares that the audience in the theatre at which I saw it seemed legitimately puzzled. The girl behind me had her feet resting on the seat beside, and only twice did she thrash her flip-flops near the side of my face with anything approaching fright. Not that a film should be judged in relation to how it appears in its marketing campaign, but in this case I’m inclined to side with the audience, who shuffled out of the theatre, tired and defeated. Part of this has to do with LaBute simply not having the chops for the visceral, intense style that the subject matter calls for: throughout the film he occasionally returns (in what seems like desperation) to a flashback shot of a large semi-truck racing past the

---

---

screen to give the audience a jolt. But other than that he proceeds with an altogether pedestrian visual style in a genre film that seems to demand more of a directorial flourish.

Sometimes when I’m up at 1:07 a.m. on a Sunday night (i.e. every Sunday night), I watch Ebert & Roeper at the Movies, and though admittedly at this time of night my own faculties are not exactly at their sharpest, I’m always a little annoyed by what seems to be the sole critical tool at second fiddle Richard Roeper’s disposal, his oft-repeated complaint: “But Raa-jur, that would never happen in real life.” Smarmy, for sure, but the problem is that he’s generally right. Many Hollywood movies fail to bring about a successful union of the imagination with the scenario, which, in the right hands, leads to that exhilarating cliché, the suspension of disbelief. But if the execution is off (and, in this case, it most certainly is), it’s almost impossible to recover. Nearly every scene falls flat in The Wicker Man because it is so clumsily written and staged so poorly that the audience is not once inclined to go along with what takes shape on screen. We never doubt for a second that Rowan is on the island, despite LaBute’s repeated efforts to call into doubt whether or not this is all “really happening.”

The film’s climax, such as it is, is perhaps the movie’s one saving grace: convinced that the residents of the island plan to burn Rowan as a sacrifice for their coming harvest, Edward disguises himself as a large stuffed bear (thus blending in to the commune’s animalworshipping festival) and attempts to make his escape, with Rowan in tow. The result is a weird and possibly even disastrous last five minutes, but which at the very least adds some pleasurable eccentricity to what is otherwise a dull, sloppy affair.