Nicolas Cage is a actually a very good actor with extremely poor taste.
Taste in what?
He might have exquisite taste in antique furniture, or modernist art, or vintage cars. And movies like National Treasure and Face/Off and Con Air probably pay him considerably more than movies like Adaptation and The Weather Man.
I see that today is his 47th birthday—I would have put him at a few years older than that, but I know he supposedly used to run pretty hard, even by Hollywood standards.
(Years back, a friend of mine told me she saw him staggering out of a L.A. liquor store at around 8 or 9 in the morning, wearing a torn and bloody shirt. Hopefully he has slowed down since then.)
I loved Next because I saw it as a Rifftrax. Recommended!
In all cases Nicolas Cage is playing the exact same character: Nicolas Cage. Some movies need a Nicolas Cage type character, some don’t. When Cage is particularly grating in a movie I blame the casting director.
I’ve heard his recent list of movies described as “That one where Cage gets to be a ____.”
That one where Cage gets to be a superhero.
That one where Cage gets to be another superhero.
That one where Cage gets to be in an anime.
That one where Cage gets to be a sorceror.
He is a giant nerd with the clout to get roles he wants to play.
I mostly agree with this assessment and would add the failure blame on the script as well. Bad casting and bad script trump bad acting in most cases and Cage can usually fake the acting when it’s just a stretch.
Yeah, he was excellent in that. I’m not sure that Cage really has that much range as an actor - but what the hell do I know - but he was absolutely perfect for the role and it was one of the few Cage movies I actually liked in a long long time (even though it’s all kinds of messed up).
I couldn’t even finish Lord of War.
That is what I assumed. Looks like he spends cash faster than Michael Jackson, has absolutely zero money knowledge and owes millions in back taxes. Makes sense that he churns out several dozen crap films a year…
This is probably a big part of it. This a guy who named his son Kal-El, after all.
He always reminds me a bit of Jimmy Stewart. Not directly, but they both give out that nice, slightly-dorky-but-with-a-not-so-subtle-hint-that-he’s-holding-down-some-serious-crazy vibe.
He is pretty good at the action movie thing, at least. Looking cool while stepping out of a car as the wind blows your coat behind you is considerably more difficult than one might assume.
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Everyone forgot the one where he gets to be John Travolta. I liked that one.
Face/Off, a damn fine movie to be sure.
Eh. At some point you have enough money, and then the question is, what do you want? What do you want to achieve? What do you want to change? What do you want to be remembered for?
Oh, definitely. A great movie, and he was pretty good in it.
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans, World Trade Centre, and Matchstick Men were all, I thought, pretty good movies. People need to adjust their filter a little beyond “Such and such is in it therefore I will/won’t see it”. It’s pretty simplistic and you end up missing a ton of good movies. That is, of course, unless Paul Walker is in it, then it’ll pretty much be crap. Even with him, Running Scared was pretty good.
Nicolas Cage has been in all kinds of good movies in the latter half of his career. Since 2000:
2000: The Family Man, which was perfectly decent
2001: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, which wasn’t all that bad
2002: Adaptation, terrific
2003: Matchstick Men, terrific
2005: Lord of War, fantastic
2005: The Weather Man, not shabby
2006: World Trade Center, pretty good
2007: Grindhouse, funny as hell. Small little role tho
2007: Next, decent popcorn movie.
2010: Kick-Ass, terrific
Some of the other stuff I did’t name wasn’t real good, but it wasn’t terrible - National Treasure is stupid, but it’s not really bad. Has he been in some dreck? Yes, he has, and “The Wicker Man” is easily one of the worst movies of the last ten years. But if you look at his IMDB listings, his win-loss ratio isn’t any worse than most actors. Frankly, I don’t understand what the heck people are talking about when they say Cage makes movies worse.
Part of it may be that he appears in a lot of films for an actor of his stature. Cage is one of the most prolific Grade-A stars of our time. In the last ten years he has acted in 23 films live, plus three or four voice work films. It’s inevitable he’ll end up in some stinkers.
But he doesn’t have enough money, remember? 
He probably won’t for a long time.
Paul Walker was in Pleasantville, which was wonderful (although he had only a small role in that). I think he’s gonna be one of those actors who turns to directing or producing someday soon, anyway.
You mean like D Hoffman getting 6 million for 5 days of filming the latest Fokker flick?
You’re right, I’d completely forgotten he was even in pleasantville. I love that movie.
This are such dam wordy articles. Allow me to summerize: If you’re watching a Nicholas Cage movie, there’s an 85% chance you’re watching a bad Nicholas Cage movie. And it’s 50-50 that it’s worse than bad.
And if you’re watching The Wicker Man, you’re watching a movie so ridiculously bad that it might turn a corner and be good, for the wrong reasons.