Director: Yuval Adler (USA). Year of Release: 2023
Las Vegas. A man drops his kid off at the kid’s grandma’s, before he heads off towards the maternity ward. The man’s wife is due to give birth and he’s nervous. He toys with ultrasound pictures from their other kid – the one that never was born alive. As he reaches the hospital car park, a man with maroon hair and a goatee gets into the back of his car. It is Nicolas Cage doing that Nic Cage thing of wildly overacting.
Cage (who’s character never reveals his name) asks the driver to pick a card. After a bit of confusion, the driver finally names the Ace of Spades and his passenger pulls out exactly that card. How do you react to this scene? Do you think it was enigmatic or witty? Then maybe you’ll get on with Sympathy for the Devil a lot better than I did. If you’re more on my wavelength, you’ll spend an awful lot of time muttering “just what was the point in that?”
Whatever, it’s not long before the passenger is pointing a gun in the face of the driver and telling him to drive to Boulder, Colorado to visit the passenger’s dying mother. Through talks on his mobile phone with his increasingly anxious and expectant wife, we learn that the driver’s name is David. David pleads with his unnamed guest that he has a family emergency. “I’m your family emergency now” replies a manic voice from the back seat.
As we’ve already been shown in an early scene, the car is running on empty, so David has to pull into a petrol station. With his passenger’s gun trained on him, he fills the tank, glancing desperately at the other drivers in the station forecourt and mouthing “Help!” at them. All to no avail. In the good old days, when you had to go to the counter and pay proper money for your petrol, this would have been a much shorter film.
As they approach a traffic cop, David starts to drive erratically and over the speed limit. The cop pulls them over, whereupon the passenger starts answering back and being a bit of a dick. When the cop asks him to get out of the car, he shoots out, wasting the cop. Look, I know this is all part of setting the passenger up to be edgy and erratic but this makes no dramatic sense, particularly later on when the film makes out that he’s badly misunderstood.
The passenger then tells a meandering tale about something that happened to him in Boston. A bookkeeper is involved, and his wife and daughter. We hear all sorts of names which we don’t need to remember because we know that this is just a long speech to push the plot along. The problem is that the speech is so unengaging and Cage’s mannerisms are (still) so irritating that it doesn’t really take us anywhere interesting. We don’t care.
You remember that period after Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction when every other film was a second-rate attempt to rip off Quentin Tarantino (several of them made by Tarantino himself)? Were you relieved when the flow of these films dried down and some directors returned to making films which were witty and original? Well maybe you got relieved too soon. Here is a film with plenty of violence and interminable monologues but no wit at all.
There is a scene in a diner, because in this sort of film there is always a scene in a diner. The passenger puts a song on the jukebox, dances and sings, because, see above. Then he starts shooting and burns the place down. Because of the sheer dreary inevitability of it all, what should be gripping and exciting is, in fact, slightly boring. We are not surprized by anything that happens, as we’ve seen this film too many times before.
And that’s pretty much it. The film gets increasingly violent, but it’s not fun violence or even exciting violence. It’s just violence for the sake of it, which is neither spectacular nor cool. The passenger continues to make statements which I think are supposed to sound profound but make no sense at all. And, this being a Nicolas Cage film, he continues to show tics and bug eyes, because this is what Cage does instead of acting.
Maybe I should mention the twist at the end. Or maybe I shouldn’t because it’s so bleeding obvious and just plain dumb that mentioning it would hardly count as a plot spoiler. Let’s just say that the attempt to give the film depth and intelligence badly misfires. For a film which involves a lot of driving, Sympathy for the Devil is ironically very pedestrian. We just don’t care enough about either of the protagonists for any of it to really work.
A number of reviews have said that your enjoyment of Sympathy for the Devil depends a lot on your tolerance level for Nicolas Cage. I tend to agree, and I am highly intolerant (I have long argued that he should have quit when he was ahead after Raising Arizona). It’s not just the hideous overacting, it’s that Cage always overacts in exactly the same way. Why watch 20 Nic Cage films when you can watch the same one over and over and over again?
As it happens, I was watching the film with someone who actually likes Cage’s style of overacting, and even finds him funny. I guess this shows that Cage isn’t successful (if gurning in a B-movie like this counts as success) just because of nepotism and over-indulgent studios. There are people out there who find this sort of thing good, or at least watchable. There’s no accounting for taste.
What Sympathy for the Devil lacks in originality, it also lacks in wit, style, and coherence. I find it hard to conceive how even Cage fans can believe that it’s a good movie. Among other things, it’s just so boring. In an early scene the passenger says “we still have miles to go before we sleep.” Well, I don’t know if I actually fell asleep, but my eyes did droop and my mind started to wander. Maybe I’d just had a long day. More likely, it was just a bad film.
CinePhil 