Every 2021 Nicolas Cage Movie, Ranked
I started doing annual Nic Cage rankings in 2019 as an excuse to write a funny article about bad movies and over-the-top performances. That year was especially fun because Cage made five terrible movies that provided a lot of great material.
While his 2021 filmography still dabbles in the absurd and the violent (and the absurdly violent), Cage took a moment to step away from low budget action flicks to deliver the performance of his career in a beautifully earnest independent drama that caught me completely off guard and made me question my entire reason for being. If he keeps this up, I might need to rethink my approach to this blog post. For now, I’m keeping the format the same while choosing to bare my soul through a public existential crisis rather than cracking cheap jokes.
1. Pig
Tagline: We don’t get a lot of things to really care about.
Metacritic: 82%
Rotten Tomatoes: 97%
IMDb: 7.0/10
My Grade: A-
Where to Watch It: Hulu or rent it through the tech monopoly of your choice
Notable Co-Stars: Alex Wolff, Adam Arkin, David Knell
Most Memorable Line
Cage: “We don’t have to care. People first came out here ten thousand years ago. We would have been under four hundred feet of water. Every two hundred years, we get an earthquake right along the coast. One’s coming up. When the shockwave hits, most of the city will flatten. Every bridge will fall into the Willamette, so… there’s nowhere to go, even if we could. Anyone who survives that’s just waiting. Five minutes later, they’ll look up, and they’ll see a wave ten stories high. And then all this, everyone… it’s all gonna be at the bottom of the ocean. Again. You should use stale bread for french toast.”
When I first saw the trailer, I assumed Pig was a more artistic version of a John Wick-style revenge thriller. Nicolas Cage stars as Rob, a talented chef who abandons his popular Portland restaurant and moves to the woods upon his wife’s death. He spends his days walking the forest with his pet pig and hunting truffles, which he sells to a young truffle dealer named Amir, played by Alex Wolff. When tweakers attack him and steal his porcine friend, Rob will stop at nothing to get her back.
This setup feels like half the action movies that have come out over the last fifteen years. Bad guys kidnap wife/daughter/pet of Insert Big Action Hero Here, who then wildly overreacts with an absurd killing spree that makes the villains look like boy scouts by comparison. I’m not criticizing this subgenre of action movies. I like Taken and John Wick, and I’m sure a version of that story starring Nic Cage would be a lot of fun. Pig, however, is not that movie.
Writer/director Michael Sarnoski takes advantage of viewers’ familiarity with these tropes and uses it to subvert their expectations at every turn, crafting a beautiful film about grief, empathy, and finding joy in life despite the seemingly endless reasons to fall into despair.
Cage is sensational as Rob, a man on a mission who, rather than killing or maiming the people in his way, approaches them with kindness and humanity. His tactics often have a similar effect to a punch in the face, tearing down his adversaries’ defenses with a shockingly kind-hearted demeanor that leaves them stunned and questioning their life choices.
Rob’s quest for his pig is set in the vibrant restaurant scene of Portland, Oregon, a city that could be lost to the bottom of the ocean any day now. The Cascadia subduction zone, a major fault line underneath a large section of the Pacific Northwest spanning from Northern California to Southern Canada, creates a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami once every 243 years or so. It’s been 322 years since the last one.
In one of the film’s best scenes, Rob discusses the city’s impending doom, but not from a place of despair or nihilism. He views his precarious future as a mandate to spend as much time as possible doing what he loves. He doesn’t have room for hatred or revenge. It’s not worth the time. We don’t know how much we have left.
It’s easy to draw a connection between the fate of Portland and the fate of humanity at large. Millions of people die each year from extreme temperatures, flooding, wildfires, famine, drought, and other climate-induced disasters. As the planet gets progressively warmer and governments across the globe continually fail to meet the challenge in front of us, the likelihood of our extinction seems more and more certain. Like Portland, it’s probably just a question of when.
Shortly after pontificating on their inevitable destruction, Rob and Amir go to a trendy restaurant owned by esteemed chef Derek Finway to track down a lead about the pig’s whereabouts. Rob recognizes Finway as a former employee from many years ago who once had a dream of opening a traditional English pub. As Rob’s questions about his pig go unanswered and tension builds to the point where the audience is convinced that he’s going to literally rip the chef’s head off, he instead delivers an absolute gut punch of a speech expressing his disappointment that Finway abandoned his dream in favor of something that doesn’t accurately reflect who he is:
“They’re not real. You get that, right? None of it is real. The critics aren’t real, the customers aren’t real, because this isn’t real. You aren’t real. Derek, why do you care about these people? They don’t care about you. None of them. They don’t even know you because you haven’t shown them. Every day, you’ll wake up, and there’ll be less of you. You live your life for them, and they don’t even see you. You don’t even see yourself. We don’t get a lot of things to really care about. Derek, who has my pig?”
As I’ve considered the implications of this film on my life, I’ve thought a lot about the things that make me depressed: covid, climate change, wealth inequality, partisanship. These issues cast a bleak shadow over the future of mankind. It’s easy to despair.
I’ve also meditated on my own mortality a lot lately. My dad is currently in the hospital with covid pneumonia. I have no idea if he’ll survive. This uncomfortable proximity to death’s cold, haphazard cruelty has given me a greater appreciation for the concepts expressed in the film. I don’t want to waste time despairing about things beyond my control. I may never love something as much as Rob loves cooking and hunting for truffles, but I really enjoy spending time with friends and writing about good movies, so I want to do more of that.
Sometimes the problems facing humanity feel too big to solve. They probably are. All we can do with the time we have left is find something to really care about. I hope you find it.
Bonus Quote
Amir: “Well, if the city floods, we can always go up to Mount Hood.”
Cage: “Hood’s an active volcano.”
Amir: “Well, I’m not fucking moving to Seattle.”
Cage: “Fuck Seattle.”
2. Prisoners of the Ghostland
Tagline: This is the ghostland. A land of no escape.
Metacritic: 53%
Rotten Tomatoes: 62%
IMDb: 4.2/10
My Grade: B-
Where to Watch It: AMC+, Shudder, or rent it through the tech monopoly of your choice
Notable Co-Stars: Sofia Boutella, Bill Moseley, Nick Cassavetes
Most Memorable Line
Cage: “I always had the same dream. The ruins. The people standing there suffering. All the people I harmed. But yesterday, they came to me, and they helped. And I know why. I understand. They help me because… I… am… radioactive.”
If you’ve read my 2020 Nic Cage rankings, you’ll remember that I was very excited about this movie. When asked about the film before its release, Cage said, “It might be the wildest movie I’ve ever made.” That’s quite a statement coming from the star of Vampire’s Kiss, Face/Off, Mandy, Color Out of Space, and countless other absurd cinematic fever dreams.
The setup is fairly straightforward. Cage, credited simply as Hero, plays a criminal who is busted after a bank robbery gone wrong. The autocratic governor of an unknown Japanese city grants him a chance at freedom if he can rescue his missing granddaughter from a strange neighboring community known as The Ghostland.
In a thick southern drawl that sounds like Foghorn Leghorn aged twenty years and bought a cotton plantation, the governor hands Cage a leather jumpsuit and explains that there are explosives attached at the neck, arms, and “testicules.” The suit can allegedly sense when its wearer feels the urge to strike a helpless woman and then detonates one of its miniature bombs.
Things get much weirder from there. The Ghostland is full of depressed people trapped in a crumbling city guarded by ghosts that allow travelers to enter but never leave. It’s basically a post-apocalyptic Hotel California. Like the classic Eagles song, the film is beautiful, haunting, and full of big ideas. Unfortunately, the story is a bit overstuffed, and the ideas don’t all come together in a satisfying way. Director Sion Sono attempts to make a film about redemption, depression, friendship, class, the afterlife, toxic waste disposal, #MeToo, and probably dozens of other concepts that I wasn’t able to pick up on as I attempted to sift through everything.
The movie is a mess, but I liked it. It’s wildly original, the set design is incredible, and it’s packed with great Cage quotes. It’s not his wildest movie, but it’s up there, and it’s worth checking out.
Bonus Quote
Cage: “Impossible? HA!!! If you had told me three days ago I’d be standing here with one arm and one… TESTICLE!!!!! Trying to reason with you bitches! I would have said impossible too. But I’m telling you, there’s a way. Now you could stay here, suffer, survive. I don’t have the time! I got one day to tear this shit apart! Now you can either help me, or rot.”
Another Bonus Quote
Cage: “You were always so much fun when you had a couple of shots of whiskey in you.”
Psycho: “We used to have so much fun, didn’t we?”
Cage: “Yeah. We did. But then you started blowing up little kids.”
Psycho: “Oh, come on.”
3. Willy’s Wonderland
Tagline: Let playtime begin.
Metacritic: 44%
Rotten Tomatoes: 61%
IMDb: 5.5/10
My Grade: C
Where to Watch It: Hulu or rent it through the tech monopoly of your choice
Notable Co-Stars: Beth Grant, Emily Tosta
Most Memorable Line
Sheriff: “Put your balls on, Evan! We’re goin’ to Willy’s.”
If you’ve ever wanted to see Nic Cage fall in love with an old school pinball machine, sensually caressing every button and knob along the way, this is the film for you. A completely silent Nicolas Cage, this time credited merely as The Janitor, drives his suped up Camaro over a suspiciously placed set of road spikes on the outskirts of a small Texas town.
The local mechanic only accepts cash, so Cage agrees to work off the debt by spending the night cleaning a run-down Chuck-E-Cheese knock-off that the proprietor is planning to reopen. What he doesn’t know is that the robot band is possessed by a group of undead serial killers eager to feast on his soul.
Cage is great as the taciturn janitor, methodically cleaning every inch of the building and ruthlessly killing interrupting robots with whatever janitorial tools are at his disposal. He takes scheduled breaks to suck down energy drinks and spend quality time with the aforementioned pinball machine.
I can see why Cage was drawn to this concept. It’s a fantastic premise, but unfortunately it isn’t executed well. The kills are fun, but they leave something to be desired. Keeping Cage silent for the whole film is a bold move, and it leads to a few laughs, but I really wanted some over-the-top one-liners with my robot exterminations.
The rest of the cast is pretty terrible. There’s a group of local teens planning to destroy Willy’s Wonderland that makes predictably stupid decisions just like every teen that’s ever been in a horror movie. Then there’s the sheriff, the mechanic, and the owner, who are feeding out-of-towners to the demon robots in exchange for the safety of the locals. All of these characters are poorly written and poorly acted. Cage does what he can, but he can’t save the movie from its childish script. This is a pretty big missed opportunity for an idea that should have been a slam dunk.
Bonus Quote
Robot Band Member (to small child): “Wanna fuck, Fatty?”
Looking to ahead to 2022, Cage has a few films scheduled to release that look interesting, including a western, a crime film, and this:
I cannot fucking wait to see that movie and write about it for all of you next year.
Previous Nic Cage Rankings:
Every 2019 Nicolas Cage Movie, Ranked
Every 2020 Nicolas Cage Movie, Ranked
Michael Dixon is a mild mannered accountant by day and a mild mannered movie watcher by night. He will not do your taxes for you. He lives in Austin, Texas with his lovely television and collection of fine whiskies. Follow him on Twitter @mDixon00 and check out his podcast here. You can’t purchase his book anywhere because it doesn’t exist.
