So, until the inevitable Scorcerer's Apprentice sequel, audiences are thrown this tired bag of bones to chew on (and the Scorcerer's Apprentice was hardly a worthwhile meal in the first place).
This time around, modern-day NYC has been forsaken, its back to medieval Europe, in the grip of the plague while many, many leagues east, knights hack the 'infidels' to death under the urging of chain mail-wearing priests. Scorcerers and zealots good; witches, bad.
At tleast that's the comparison that's being begged by this set-up. Cage here is one of the aforesaid knights, renowned for his battlefield skills and valor, but disgusted by the killing and distrustful of his masters' religious zealotry.
He, along with his compadre (well played by Hellboy's Ron Perlman) choose to desert the Crusading army, and spend days wandering through death and desolation before alighting upon a town, decimated by the plague. Here, they are "unexpectedly" pressed back into serving the church, this time to deliver an accused witch (Claire Foy, from "Little Dorritt") for "trial" at some far-off monastery, accompanied by a priest (Stephen Campbel Moore) an aspiring knight, a wily salesman (read "con") and a town elder who has lost his entire family to the contagion.
All the visual bells and whistles are there, particularly in the cliamactic scene when things get really ugly, and director Dominic Sena (who previously worked with Cage in Gone In Sixty Seconds) clearly knows how to get maximum mileage from the assigned talent.
The problem is Cage himself. All the promise of Rumblefish and Birdy and Racing with the Moon and Raising Arizona has just been thrown out the window and then trampled on. It appears, especially since the blockbuster success of National Treasure, that Cage is content to shoulder a kind of "occult-lite" formula, bringing little to these films other than his mere presence, which I guess in itself accounts for bang atte box office.
This writer certainly wasn't expecting him to stay in the same quirky mode of his earlier work for his whole career, but this is worse: big-name schlock done purely for expected profit. Whatever the current state of his finances (reports abound of money disputes and impending bankruptcy), its sad to see good talent squandered in this way. he needs a "Refresh" and soon.
But, with the Ghost Rider sequel filming as we speak, creative renewals will just have to wait
All the visual bells and whistles are there, particularly in the cliamactic scene when things get really ugly, and director Dominic Sena (who previously worked with Cage in Gone In Sixty Seconds) clearly knows how to get maximum mileage from the assigned talent.
The problem is Cage himself. All the promise of Rumblefish and Birdy and Racing with the Moon and Raising Arizona has just been thrown out the window and then trampled on. It appears, especially since the blockbuster success of National Treasure, that Cage is content to shoulder a kind of "occult-lite" formula, bringing little to these films other than his mere presence, which I guess in itself accounts for bang atte box office.
This writer certainly wasn't expecting him to stay in the same quirky mode of his earlier work for his whole career, but this is worse: big-name schlock done purely for expected profit. Whatever the current state of his finances (reports abound of money disputes and impending bankruptcy), its sad to see good talent squandered in this way. he needs a "Refresh" and soon.
But, with the Ghost Rider sequel filming as we speak, creative renewals will just have to wait
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