There are few things better for genre movie fans these days than sitting down to watch a new Nicolas Cage movie.
Whether he’s fighting off a cult leader’s demon horde in “Mandy” or battling an assassin and a 400-pound white jaguar in “Primal,” or even dealing with the galactic fallout from a crashed meteor in “Color Out of Space,” Cage has finally, thankfully, entered that phase in his career where he clearly doesn’t give a fuck about prestige films any longer.
Now he’s just making movies that I have to imagine he himself would like to sit in a theater and watch.
Make no mistake, Cage’s lengthy resume is populated with these kinds of creative choices. This is the guy who followed up his Oscar-winning performance in “Leaving Las Vegas” by top-lining three of the 1990’s guiltiest pleasures, “Con Air,” “The Rock” and “Face/Off.”
The trick now is having the wherewithal to discern a deliriously awesome crazy Cage performance from a phoned-in, cash-the-paycheck and move on performance.
Which brings us to “Grand Isle,” one of six movies starring Cage to be released this year alone.
“Grand Isle” is a southern-fried erotic noir that can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be “Body Heat” or “The People Under the Stairs.”
Cage plays Walter, a Vietnam veteran living in a huge gothic mansion with his wife, Fancy (KaDee Strickland). Walter drinks a lot of bad beer and smokes a thick cigar and sports a shaggy mane of disheveled hair not unlike Cameron Poe in “Con Air.”
He hires another military veteran, Buddy (Luke Benward), to fix his fence before a hurricane arrives. And that’s when things get mighty confusing.
Before Buddy can finish the fence, the storm arrives, stranding him inside Walter’s mansion. From there, Fancy launches a full-throttle seduction campaign, despite the fact that Walter seems completely unhinged and dangerously jealous. Then Walter tries to convince Buddy to kill Fancy with cyanide because he claims she’s suffering from a rare, terminal blood disease. To sweeten the deal, he puts a bag with $20,000 at Buddy’s feet.
It’s fair at this point to mention that Kelsey Grammar also stars in “Grand Isle” as Detective Jones, who is interrogating Buddy after he’s been found passed out in a crashed pickup with a dead body. Buddy claims Walter tried to frame him because Buddy discovered a dark secret that may involve people being kept hostage in Walter’s basement.
“Grand Isle” toggles between the interrogation and flashbacks to Buddy’s hellish overnight experience with Fancy and Walter.
Ironically, the best part of “Grand Isle” is only hinted at in the film’s closing minutes when the depth of Walter and Fancy’s mental illness is exposed after officers raid the mansion, and just before Walter pulls a John Rambo and tries to use his military training to escape prosecution.
Like I said before, the only redeeming value of a movie like “Grand Isle” is the fact that there exists the potential for Cage to come completely unglued. That's his gift. He can magically transform even the lowliest of scripts into must-see performance art.
And he doesn’t disappoint, at least early on. With a maniacal look in his eye, Cage chews through a handful of soliloquies like he’s doing a one-man Tennessee Williams revival in front of the entire Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voting membership.
But is that enough on its own?
Sadly, no.
Despite a few impressive bursts of classic batshit Cage, “Grand Isle” simply doesn’t give the actor enough to work with to make the entire film memorable, which means I can’t justify recommending you waste 90 minutes of your life (like I did) waiting for a payoff that never arrives.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at Blood Violence and Babes.com, on Facebook @BloodViolenceBabes or on Twitter @BVB_reviews.
This article appears in Dec 5-12, 2019.