You know, writing about movies isn’t as easy it it might seem. Sure, it’s a glamorous life, filled with parties, as many beautiful people as you could ever imagine, and enough booze to wipe out the entire cast of The Wolf of Wall Street, but that doesn’t mean that these things make up for all the hardships. Well, yeah, ok, the alcohol DOES help a bit, but that’s besides the point.
What I’m getting at is that when I’m doing these Netflix articles, I like to try and find a cool angle to approach it from. Something that not everyone and their little brother has thought of before. Here’s the thing though: when I was watching Outcast I couldn’t think of a single interesting thing to say about it. Its just kind of generic and dull. “How dull?” you might ask. Well, I forgot the title and just typed “Outlaw” a second ago, so that might tell you something.
There’s a lot of low budget medieval combat going on, but I’ve seen that in a hundred other films. Setting it in ancient China is unique, but that’s really just a cosmetic thing. Hayden Christensen is the star, and I think we can all remember how compelling he was last time someone let him be the lead in an action franchise.* There’s a journey, a prince is protected and Anakin Skywalker gets the redemption that he had been looking for. Its so fucking forgettable.
Except for the twenty minutes with Nicolas Cage.
Cage is there for a bit in the very beginning. He and Christensen are fighting in the Crusades and storming a castle. He tells Christensen that they should abandon their cause and head east. Christensen tells him, in no uncertain terms, to fuck off, and then the movie jumps forward three years. Now, for almost an hour, Cage isn’t seen or talked about. I seriously thought that he wasn’t going to come back. Maybe he showed up for a day, filmed one scene, received more money than the rest of the cast and crew combined, and went home. That would have actually been pretty funny and I’m sure that I could have talked for a bit about just how amazing that was. But that’s not what happened.
Out of nowhere, he returns as the leader of a band of outlaws and rescues our heroes from the bad guys. But this is not the same Cage that we met back in the Holy Land. This is a man who has been hardened by life, and by hardened I mean that he has begun to OVERACT in the most outlandish way possible. He has a scar over one eye, something resembling a mullet, and snakes wrapped around both hands.
I’ll repeat that last part if you didn’t quite hear me. Nicolas Cage wears live snakes on his hands.
THAT IS BY FAR THE RADDEST SHIT THAT THERE HAS EVER BEEN! They don’t even make a point of it. Part of me believes that Cage just showed up on set one morning and was like, “Hey, I think my character would be the sort of person to accessorize with dangerous animals,” and no one wanted to tell him no. Its so out of left field and so incredible.
MOTHERFUCKING SNAKES!
But the badassery doesn’t end there. During the climactic final battle, Cage decides that he is going to save everyone’s lives by single handedly fighting the King’s royal guards. And he almost fucking beats them all. He takes a metric fuckton of punishment, but he keeps on killing more and more of them. It would be comical if this wasn’t such an overly serious movie. Other people fight the guards and they all get killed or barely win. Nicolas Cage gets stabbed through the goddamned chest and still manages to wipe out a few more!
Its a cliché to go on the internet and talk about the glory that is Nicolas Cage, but it’s things like this that help me to remember that all this praise is warranted. He took a movie that was so incredibly boring and lifeless and was able to inject a shot of adrenaline directly into its neck. I can’t recommend watching this whole thing but if you want to watch from minute 59 to minute 83, there are worse uses of your time.
ALL HAIL THE CAGE!
*That was sarcasm, by the way
