Review: Dog Eat Dog

Three former prison buddies of differing personalities and temperaments (Relatively cool-headed Nic Cage, brooding thug Christopher Matthew Cook, and insane druggie murderer Willem Dafoe) have been pulling off heists for a while, despite being far from slick professionals. In fact, Cage is the only one of the three who frankly isn’t insane. Seriously, one of them is even named Mad Dog (that would be Mr. Dafoe). Anyhow, they are offered one more big payday by The Greek (director Paul Schrader himself) that is an opportunity too good to pass up. All they have to do to earn a pretty penny is kidnap a baby and hold it for ransom. Somehow, these three stooges manage to find a way to cock it up. Former Aussie soap star Nicky Whelan turns up as a hooker.

If the idea of a film based on an Eddie Bunker novel, directed by Paul Schrader (the underrated “Blue Collar”, the not-bad “Auto-Focus”), and starring Nic Cage and Willem Dafoe sounds like a lot of fun to you…you’re wrong. Yeah, you’ll probably enjoy this self-indulgent, off-putting 2017 crime-caper more than I did, but trust me, even you won’t whole-heartedly love this one. I’m 90% sure of it. For starters, you’re probably going to want to see this film to see Nic Cage go bug-fuck crazy. Well, he’s pretty much the ‘straight man’ in this one, and we all know that Cage is completely boring the majority of times he’s playing it straight (I personally believe he sucks even harder in his ‘bug-fuck’ mode, but I’m aware I’m in the minority in that). Getting the ‘bug-fuck’ role is long-serving, extremely versatile character actor Willem Dafoe in one of the worst turns of his career. Dafoe has a much better strike-rate in either bug-fuck or ‘straight man’ mode (he was terrific in “Auto-Focus”), but here he whiffs big time as director Schrader indulges him far too much in this trippy, gonzo caper. Seriously, it’s as if John Waters and Hunter S. Thompson got together to collaborate on an Eddie Bunker adaptation. Instead it’s Paul Schrader (who also turns up in a supporting role) and screenwriter Matthew Wilder (surely not the same Matthew Wilder who performed the perky one-hit wonder ‘Break My Stride’?). The result is ugly and one-note, including Dafoe’s in-your-face performance. It’s irritating and very much not my thing, though the relatively unknown Christopher Matthew Cook is pretty good in an important supporting role. He’s the only one who appears to have turned up to make a real movie, instead of a self-indulgently, self-consciously quirky, ugly slog.

Sorry, but mixing drugged-up hyper directorial/visual style and hyper performances isn’t a fun mix for me. In fact, my theory is that the film has been made this way to hide the fact that the story is incredibly thin and insubstantial. The film doesn’t even run 90 minutes, and given all the dicking around it doesn’t leave much time for plot or character. There’s an audience for this flick, and even they probably won’t outright love it. Self-indulgent, mostly badly acted, garish-looking, unpleasant, tedious, and too thin to have any real impact. Nothing much to see here, folks even if you’d normally think you’d go for something like this.  

Rating: D-