Left Behind (2014)
Directed by Vic Armstrong
Considered one of the greatest stuntmen ever – title holder in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most prolific stunt person – he’s most known as one of the primary stunt guys that doubled for Harrison Ford on the Indiana Jones movies, but he also doubled as James Bond for Sean Connery and Superman for Christopher Reeve! Only has 6 directing credits, and three of them are for Indiana Jones TV episodes.
Shot by Jack N. Green who must have had something go terribly wrong in his career, as he’s a guy with a boat-load of high-profile credits including many of Clint Eastwood’s best movies: Unforgiven, A Perfect World and The Bridges of Madison County. Also? He was Jan de Bont’s shooter on Twister and Speed 2: Cruise Control! I don’t know if it means anything, but after “Left Behind,” he waited six years, did another movie, then has done another since.
The movie is terribly Hallmark or SyFy Channel, but with some impressive stunts that seem to almost exclusively happen around Cassi Thompson, who plays Nic Cage’s daughter named Chloe Steele. I kept wondering if she was a stunt woman. Turns out, she was cast last minute and this was a bit of a big break for her, but good ol’ Vic had her doing some crazy stunt work including free climbing a four hundred foot bridge support and standing on top of it while a helicopter flew around her. Bonkers.
Nic Cage’s character name is remarkable: Rayford Steele.
Evidently, no one likes this movie. Especially not Christians – the Evangelical magazine Christianity Today actually wrote that they tried to give the movie zero stars, but their website tech couldn’t do it. So one it was. The movie has a 0% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes and didn’t far much better over at IMDB.com where it earned a 3.1 out of 10. Critics savaged it. Yet somehow, the movie made just enough money to spawn not one, but two sequels and a spin-off. I should have made you watch the Kevin Sorbo-directed Left Behind 3; RIse of the AntiChrist in which Sorbo also stars as Rayford Steele, picking up where Cage left off.
The music. Christ on his throne, if there is any one thing that hobbles this movie like it’s an Annie Wilkes special, it’s the goddamn music score by veteran TV composer Jack Lenz. This is a guy whose resume is mostly scores written for “good witch” shows/movies that air on the Hallmark channel and Goodebumps specials on Nickelodeon. It’s always, and for some reason I have this synth clarinet locked in my brain from The Garbage Pail Kids movie trailer and I keep thinking it’s from Left Behind. Christ, what is this show doing to me? Seriously, this score sounds like it was lifted from a royalty free cutout bin. It cheapens rhe movie so much that I genuinely wonder if Vic Armstrong ran out of money by paying for extras that run around in circles during the end times scenes, then got to post-production with little more than a cheese sandwich left to pay for the score.
Bottom Five Nicolas Cage Performances:
5.) Color Out of Space (2019)
Nathan Gardner
Eccentric director Richard Stanley had sort of disappeared into limbo after the catastrophe that was 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau which he was fired from after years of effort. His story, told in the excellent documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau establishes the man as a wild creative force silenced by narcissistic actors and terrified studio executives, so it was exciting to see him helm a moderately higher-profile film for the first time in 23 years with Color out of Space. Unfortunately, the film’s pacing is a mess and the casting of Nicolas Cage as the patriarch of a doomed family that encounters an interdimensional meteor (or something) was a serious mis-step. Because while Cage is absolutely one of the greatest screen stars we’ve been blessed to see work over the decades, the biggest challenge he faces is playing a normal, average guy. Nathan is a boring character and Cage’s haywire energy seems uncomfortably subdued to the point where many line deliveries seem like they’re being forced out of his mouth with under a mask of barely contained blandness. The tension this produces doesn’t work, and despite some great visuals and truly unsettling story elements, Color out of Space proves that while Cage can unlock almost any character – see what I did there? – he cannot convincingly portray “normal” when surrounded by day-glow Lovecraftian horror.
4.) Season of the Witch (2011)
Behmen
Cage in a period piece? With those startlingly perfect white teeth? The actor simply never looks comfortable or right riding horses and cloaked in medieval garb, his stubble too perfect, his hair too Con-Air and his demeanor simply too modern. I loved seeing Cage and Ron Perlman together – they have some good chemistry at times – but this movie should have been set in a modern-day context somehow because while Perlman has the latitude to convincingly star as a medieval knight, Cage just seems totally out of time and place, as if he’s cosplaying at Comic-Con and cannot wait to strip out of his get-up. By the time he’s literally grappling with a CG demon that’s stabbing him over and over with winged talons, it all collapses under his inability to truly buy into what’s happening, his pain looking as fake as the not-so-special effects. One of Cage’s biggest assets as an actor is how he accesses authentic emotion for his roles, but here? Nothing. And the absence of his typical veracity makes the movie a tough watch.
3.) The Retirement Plan (2023)
Matt
Cage seems bewildered what he and several other very good actors, like Jackie Earle Haley, Ernie Hudson and – once again! – Ron Perlman, are doing in this movie. Is he a grizzled, old, drunkard of a beach bum or an ex-ass-kicking agent with a secret history he’s kept hidden from his estranged daughter who has sought him out for help after she inexplicably gets caught up as the wheel-man in a robbery. Who cares? I didn’t. The movie is lazily directed and even more lazily written with the main plot centered around a McGuffin of a hard-drive sought by a multitude of poorly acted, back-stabbing ne’re-do-wells. Only it’s not a “hard drive,” it’s a goddamn flash drive. Christ. Anyhow, it’s an action comedy with very little laughs or thrills, and word is Cage only did the movie because he hit it off with Ron Perlman on Season of the Witch and wanted to hang with his buddy while collecting a paycheck. It shows. Cage is not committed to his character and seems kind of unsure how to act as Matt, vacillating between his laid-back mode best utilized in David Gordon Green’s Joe and the kind of rusty action hero he’s loved for in Mandy. These are uneasy bedfellows, and so Cage kind of randomly switches gears, unsure of what direction to travel in and, instead, choosing every direction. Ultimately his disinterest in acting in this convoluted, really unexciting story overwhelms his scenes, resulting in the kind of detachment evident in his most forgettable roles – like this episode’s feature, Left Behind. One of Cage’s super-powers is being able to breathe nuance into hum-drum roles. Here he seemed to be given a pretty juicy role at the center of a mess and he simply couldn’t get up the energy to give it any due. Probably a fine thing considering the movie opened on 1,175 screens but only grossed $745,000, making it the lowest total ever for a Nicolas Cage wide release. Luckily he recycled this grizzled look for the much-better 2024 release The Surfer.
2.) Zandalee (1991)
Johnny Collins
Nic Cage and Judge Reinhold in a 90’s sex drama? It sounds like the set up for a punchline and that punchline is… Zandalee! That’s the name of Reinhold’s wife who is seduced by badboy painter Johnny Collins played by a Cage with an obscenely stupid goatee and long black hair. We could have done a bottom five based all around Cage’s wigs and facial hair in films – the man is certainly a chameleon – but in this foolishly unerotic erotic non-thriller, Cage looks like he’s trying on a greasy, sweaty artist persona and then trying to equip it with some sense of dangerous charisma, like what Mickey Rourke was known for in 91/2 Weeks. But in this mess, Cage cannot, in any way, sustain any level of magnetism and instead comes off as a mulleted, obnoxious, overly-confident and gross asshole who cuckolds his old buddy Reinhold who is dealing with impotence brought on by his working a non-creative life. Everything about the movie doesn’t work due to the two leads – Reinhold and Cage – having zero chemistry, so believing they were ever buddies is impossible, and the whole movie hinges on the betrayal of their friendship. But is it worth watching at all? Strangely… yes? You get some neat early work from Steve Bucemi, Joe Pantoliano and the wonderful Viveca Lindfors who most would recognize as Creepshow‘s aunt Bedelia. And, if you’re a letch – and face it, if you’re watching Zandalee, you probably are – Erika Anderson gives viewers an arresting eyeful as the title character. But Cage? He’s tragically miscast and flailing with a stringy-haired wig and edgy artistic expression. We do get an early Cage freakout, so if you’re looking for the buds of what he’d later manifest fully in Mandy, this might be of interest to you. Also? The movie ends with one of the wackiest, most laughably awful twists ever.
1.) Vampire’s Kiss (1988)
Peter Loew
Nic Cage sports a horrific faux-British accent and descends into incomprehensibly-motivated madness because he thinks he’s a vampire… maybe? Sort of? Because of a bite? Or loneliness? Or… bat trauma? The plot is incoherent, but what’s unforgettable is how committed Cage is to a performance that plays like a dare. He flails through New York in slow decline, eats a real cockroach on camera, screeches the entire alphabet at his therapist, and stalks a coworker with such cruelty that it shifts the tone from surreal black comedy to outright horror.
The film was written by Joseph Minion—yes, the same guy who penned After Hours—and directed by Robert Bierman, a British commercial director making his feature debut after being hired literally because his previous film fell through when tragedy struck his family. Bierman was originally set to direct a different feature project when, while scouting locations in South Africa, his young daughter tragically passed away. Understandably, he stepped away from that production to grieve and process the loss. In the aftermath, wanting a return to work—but something less emotionally tied—he was offered Vampire’s Kiss as a lower-stakes, offbeat genre piece that didn’t require the same kind of personal investment.
Bierman has since spoken sparingly about Vampire’s Kiss, often in tones of polite confusion. He’s said he essentially let Cage do his thing—having been sold on Cage’s pitch to play the role in a wildly stylized, surreal way. Bierman didn’t push back much, in part because he was still emotionally raw, and because he trusted Cage’s instincts (or perhaps didn’t feel equipped to rein them in)
The result is one of the most chaotic, alienating performances ever captured on film—so much so that even the studio didn’t know what to do with it. Critics at the time were mystified, and the film was a commercial flop. But over the years, Vampire’s Kiss has built a massive cult following among irony-loving cinephiles and meme-makers who see it as the birth of Cage’s gonzo screen persona. And yes, this is where the now-famous “You don’t say?!” reaction image came from.
Is it good? No. Is it watchable? Occasionally. But as a performance, it’s so indulgent and disconnected from any human behavior that it feels less like acting and more like performance art—if that art were accidentally summoned by a cursed copy of GQ. It’s not that Cage is bad in Vampire’s Kiss—it’s that he’s aggressively incompatible with the movie he’s in. It’s like watching a man drown in his own ego while biting the scenery. And a pigeon.