While we certainly would celebrate if he mounted a proper comeback, we would be lying if we said that the current i-will-do-any-dodgy-B-movie-so-long-as-you-pay-me phase of Nic Cage wasn’t our second-favorite Nic Cage phase. Sure, it doesn’t match up to the truly great late 80s/early 90s run from “Birdy” and “Raising Arizona” through to “Red Rock West,” but we’d arguably take it over the Bruckheimer Cage of the 90s, or the still-famous-but-making-crap Cage of the 00s.
There’s a certain self-awareness to the kind of thing that Cage has been doing that makes it more fun to see him do these barely-released programmers than, say, John Travolta or Al Pacino. And he does keep you on your toes with something interesting every so often — he’s actually winning strong reviews at TIFF with Midnight Madness film “Mom And Dad,” and has Panos Cosmatos’ fascinating-sounding “Mandy” coming up in 2018.
And when he signs on to a movie like “Primal,” as The Hollywood Reporter reveals he’s done, you have to admire his eye for a mental B-movie logline. Because, you see, “Primal” is a movie where Nic Cage will fight a jaguar on a boat. More accurately, the film sees Cage play Frank Walsh, a big-game hunter on a Greek shipping freighter with a haul of deadly wild animals from the Amazon, a freighter that’s also hauling a captured political assassin, who escapes and lets all the animals, including a white jaguar, loose.
I mean, how could you not want to see that movie? It’s being directed by stunt coordinator Nick Powell, who’s worked on films including “The Bourne Identity,” “The Three Musketeers” and “Hot Rod,” so it should at least deliver on the Cage vs. jaguar mayhem front. Filming begins in October, and you should be able to see it, hopefully on the IMAX 70mm release a premise that great deserves (but more realistically on VOD), sometime next year.