Set in the 80s, we meet logger Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) and his fantasy artist and gas station attendant girlfriend, Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough) at their lakeside cabin. A cult calling themselves Children of the New Dawn along with the help of a drugged-up, cannibalistic biker gang called The Black Skulls, kidnap Mandy for their leader, Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache). However, Mandy rejects Sand and he instead burns her alive in front of Red.
Red then goes on a vengeful rampage armed with a special crossbow, a handmade axe and a whole tonne of hallucinogenic drugs... Oh, and there's a chainsaw battle also.
For me, the description sounded a lot better than the finished article. While I don't dislike Nicolas Cage, there's only so much entertainment I can glean from the famous Cage Rage - and this film is chalk full of it. The plot is pretty simple and the imagery is often really creative but it's all done with a kind of pretentious smirk and a lot of colour filters and starts to wear after a while. Some scenes are fantastically metal but the style likes to jump all over the place. For a film where all the characters are on drugs, however, I guess this makes sense. I guess that's also true for the odd dialogue...
The film takes a while to get started, and when it finally does it jumps off the deep end in an impressive way. If it had been cheesier, it would have been superb. But the arthouse pretention keeps this for being a hit for me.
[Image: Spectrevision, et al]
Hani
No comments:
Post a Comment