Every 2023 Nicolas Cage Movie, Ranked
We’re back, folks! I took a year off from this odd endeavor last year when Cage only made one movie. While it was quite a doozy, it felt weird to write this article to rank a single movie against itself. Thank God 2023 saw Cage return to his workaholic self, putting out a whopping six movies in a twelve-month span. You could even argue that he starred in seven films last year if you count The Flash, but I’m not fucking watching that. Fifteen seconds of an embarrassingly animated Nicolas Cage without a speaking part does not count as a movie role.
As usual, Cage’s annual output consisted of some fascinating, beautiful films and some awful dreck that only the bravest Cage fans should dare lay eyes on. Whether the movie falls into the former category or the latter, Cage’s performance is almost always full of fascinating choices. His ability to single-handedly elevate otherwise terrible movies to watchable levels is truly unmatched. But let’s start with his best film of the year, shall we?
1. Dream Scenario
Tagline: Meet the man of your dreams.
Metacritic: 74%
Rotten Tomatoes: 92%
IMDb: 7.4/10
My Grade: A-
Where to Watch It: Buy it through the tech monopoly of your choice
Notable Co-Stars: Julianne Nicholson, Tim Meadows, Michael Cera
Most Memorable Line
Cage: “I hope I’m behaving through your dreams.”
Molly: “Oh, no. You’re not. No. Not at all.”
Given Cage’s penchant for taking risks and the monumental number of low budget movies he’s appeared in over the past decade, I‘m surprised that this is his first collaboration with independent distributor A24. The two seem like a natural fit for each other, and Dream Scenario is an excellent demonstration of what Cage can do with a well developed character and an inventive script.
In his best performance since Pig, Cage plays Paul Matthews, a timid, unassuming biology professor whose career hasn’t gone quite as well as he hoped. He has an idea for a book about ant behavior, but he’s never found the time to write it. Some of his former colleagues have become renowned in the academic world for publishing work based on Paul’s ideas, and he feels that he hasn’t been rightfully recognized for his genius. When people around the world begin seeing him in their dreams, Paul gets swept up in the phenomenon and attempts to leverage his newfound fame into a book deal.
A Serious Man for the Twitter age, the story follows Paul through his meteoric rise to fame and almost immediate fall from grace as things keep happening to him despite his constant refrain of “but I didn’t do anything.” As the internet eats him alive, he refuses to take responsibility for his actions (or inaction), creating consequences for himself and his family. The film is equally funny and thoughtful, asking questions about modern internet culture that perhaps can’t be answered.
The always great Tim Meadows is perfect as Paul’s boss and confidant, and Michael Cera is hilarious as the smug head of a talent agency determined to pressure Paul into a viral advertising deal with Sprite. But it’s Cage’s nuanced performance that makes this film really work. Paul is incapable of being comfortable in his own skin, and Cage plays him with a shy voice and nervous jitter that add humor and tension to every scene. As he navigates the character’s emotional rollercoaster over the course of the film, Cage combines comedy and drama to a level of success rarely achieved by anyone not named Leonardo DiCaprio.
Cage’s performance is emblematic of the film as a whole. Dream Scenario beautifully combines the comedic and the dramatic, the grounded and the fantastic, the real and the surreal. It’s a story that encapsulates 2023 as well as any film that came out this year, and Cage, as perhaps the most memed actor of all time, is the perfect person to tell it.
Bonus Quote
Cage: “Okay, but then no ads, no Sprite. We’re focusing on the book.”
Michael Cera: “Yes, and you know, if you’re not feeling Sprite, we’ll respect that. I would just ask in return that you hear out our pitches and just keep an open mind, you know, especially with things like Sprite because, you know, the door is kind of wide open there.”
2. Butcher’s Crossing
Tagline: Nature judges like a god all men that come to her.
Metacritic: 55%
Rotten Tomatoes: 74%
IMDb: 5.7/10
My Grade: B+
Where to Watch It: Rent it through the tech monopoly of your choice
Notable Co-Stars: Paul Raci, Xander Berkeley
Most Memorable Line
Cage: “I’ll help with the skinning if need be, but help you or not, you will skin them, Fred. You’ll skin them if they’re bloated. You’ll skin them if they’re froze. You’ll skin them if you have to pry their hides loose with a goddamn crowbar! Fred, when you crawl away from here, you crawl away quietly. These buffalo spook. I’ll shoot you.”
Cage’s second foray into the western genre (we’ll talk about his first later in this article) features the Oscar winner as a crazed buffalo hunter, hell-bent on amassing a fortune by killing and skinning as many buffalo as he can get his hands on. When a wide-eyed Harvard dropout rides into town with a full wallet and a yearning for adventure, Cage convinces him to fund his dangerous hunt into the Rocky Mountains.
The script is simple, but director Gabe Polsky uses exquisite cinematography and an enrapturing score to tell a haunting, nihilistic story of man’s futile war with nature and the inevitably destructive outcome for all involved. Cage gives a great performance as the grizzly, single-minded hunter. The rest of the cast is a little weak aside from the always great Paul Raci, but that’s a minor complaint in an otherwise compelling film.
Bonus Quote
Cage (to a herd of buffalo): “Think you can step on my head? You can take your two thousand pounds and try to crush my skull in? Now, you’re all gonna die. I’m not fuckin’ smiling!”
3. Sympathy for the Devil
Tagline: Revenge is a hell of a ride.
Metacritic: 54%
Rotten Tomatoes: 58%
IMDb: 5.5/10
My Grade: C+
Where to Watch It: AMC+, or rent it through the tech monopoly of your choice
Notable Co-Stars: Joel Kinnaman
Most Memorable Line
Cage: “Well, I’ve never been happy. You know why? Sinuses. Ever since I was a small child, I’ve had a stuffy nose. And even at the tender age of two years old, I knew the cause of my stuffy nose. I could see it in my dreams. And the cause was the Mucus Man. And the Mucus Man was a skinny guy in a suit and tie with a bald head and a briefcase full of boogers. And I could see him in my mind’s eye going up, up, up in an elevator, briefcase in hand, and he glided across the floor, almost like a snail’s trail. And he got to my bed, and he opened the briefcase, and he scooped out a handful of boogers, and he sprinkled them into my nose.”
Sympathy for the Devil feels like a remake of Michael Mann’s Collateral with a much lower budget and the crazy dial turned up to eleven. Joel Kinnaman plays a father frantically driving to the hospital to get there in time for the birth of his daughter. As soon as he parks, a suave stranger dressed like a classy magician (Cage, credited merely as The Passenger) jumps in his backseat, shoves a gun in his face, and orders him to start driving.
The plot is pretty derivative, but Cage gives a hell of a performance and gets to say a lot of wild shit like the monologue above. You can tell he’s having a great time playing a maniacally evil character, and that makes the movie fun to watch, even if you know where it’s going. It’s not a good movie, but Cage’s performance makes this thing way better than it has any right to be.
Bonus Quote
Cage: “What do you think? Still sexy? I dressed up for this night. Now you break my nose? I wanted to be 100% sex tonight, and you cut that in half. I’m now 50% sex.”
4. Renfield
Tagline: Sucks to be him.
Metacritic: 53%
Rotten Tomatoes: 58%
IMDb: 6.4/10
My Grade: C
Where to Watch It: Amazon Prime, or rent it through the tech monopoly of your choice
Notable Co-Stars: Nicholas Hoult, Awkwafina, Ben Schwartz
Most Memorable Line
Cage: “I wish to spend a season in hell, where all the amusing people are. Hail, Satan!!!”
When I first heard that Nicolas Cage was playing Dracula, I got very excited. Cage loves German Expressionism, and he’s implemented that over-the-top, emotional acting style in many memorable performances over the years such as Vampire’s Kiss and Face/Off. Cage finally playing an actual German Expressionist character feels like what he’s been working toward his whole career.
Unfortunately, Renfield’s dull script doesn’t give Cage much to work with. He’s great as Dracula, but he doesn’t get a lot of screen time or memorable dialogue, as evidenced by the two quotes I pulled from the film. The story centers around Renfield dealing with his guilty conscience and trying to create a life for himself away from Dracula. The problem with that approach is that Dracula is by far the most engrossing role in the movie, and he’s constantly sidelined by less interesting characters. If you’re a Cage fan, it’s worth watching to see him having fun in a crazy role, but Renfield is not a good movie.
Sidenote: How does Ben Schwartz keep getting work?
Bonus Quote
Cage: “Doug is trash! You’re feeding me trash! You know, I don’t ask for much, Renfield! Just the blood of a few dozen innocent people. I want happy couples, unsuspecting tourists, a handful of nuns, a busload of cheerleaders.”
5. The Old Way
Tagline: You can outnumber him, but you can’t outfight him.
Metacritic: 43%
Rotten Tomatoes: 32%
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: Noah Le Gros, Clint Howard, Ryan Kiera Armstrong
Most Memorable Line
Cage: “Even though I could recognize fear in men, I can honestly say I had no idea what it actually felt like. It was as if… I’d been born… dead inside. But I didn’t care. ‘Cuz I was dead inside.”
In over four decades of professional acting, Nicolas Cage has finally moseyed on into the western genre. I’m not sure why he’s avoided it for so long, but it might have something to do with his terrible southern accent. He did a convincing country drawl in Raising Arizona, but that was a long time ago. It got worse in Con Air, and it looks like it’s gone down hill ever since. I’m not sure what he’s trying to do with his voice in this movie, but it doesn’t work.
The Old Way opens with a public hanging in a small western town. The town boss gives a self-righteous speech, claiming that God ordained him to rule this town and rid it of its evil sinners. When a posse attempts to free the condemned man, Cage, with his comedically fake mustache flapping in the wind, whips out his pistol and indiscriminately starts killing men on both sides of the conflict, emptying their wallets as he goes. The now freed convict reaches for his gun, and Cage blows his brains out right in front of his young son.
Cut to TWENTY YEARS LATER. Cage, now missing the aforementioned mustache to signify the passage of time, is a family man with a wife and twelve-year-old daughter living just outside a small Montana town where he runs a general store. The son of the man he killed twenty years ago is now a bonafide outlaw leading a gang of hoodlums, one of which is played by the always entertaining Clint Howard. One day while Cage and his daughter are at work, the gang stops by his house and murders his wife.
Thus begins the standard revenge plot that seems to be required of every action movie to come out of Hollywood in the past fifteen years. Cage, utterly consumed by revenge, takes his daughter on a quest to track down the murderers and put them deep in the cold Montana dirt.
You’ve seen this movie a dozen times by now. The Old Way brings nothing new to the revenge genre except a particularly awful script. It’s full of poorly written soliloquies, predictable plot points, and embarrassingly bad southern accents (mostly Cage). Clint Howard is pretty funny, and there are some gorgeous landscape shots, but that’s about all this movie has going for it.
Bonus Quote
Clint Howard: “The bitch kicked me in the balls!”
Noah Le Gros: “You just got your ass whooped by an unarmed woman doin’ her laundry. You sure you have balls?”
6. The Retirement Plan
Tagline: Retirement can be a real killer.
Metacritic: TBD — less than 4 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes: 60%
IMDb: 5.0/10
My Grade: D+
Where to Watch It: Hulu, or rent it through the tech monopoly of your choice
Notable Co-Stars: Ron Perlman, Jackie Earle Haley, Ernie Hudson, Joel David Moore
Most Memorable Line
Cage: “Yeah, yeah, hand me a sack of shit and tell me it’s fish and chips.”
In yet another Taken-esque old guy action movie, the great Nicolas Cage plays a retired government assassin drinking away his lonely twilight years in the Cayman Islands when all of a sudden, an eleven-year-old girl claiming to be his granddaughter shows up at his doorstep saying that her parents are in trouble.
Despite this movie’s stellar cast, the production value is shockingly bad. For a film that was allegedly shot in the Cayman Islands, there are a hell of a lot of beach scenes staged in front of a green screen. The script is convoluted and juvenile. There are so many plot twists and double crosses that by the end of the movie, you just stop giving a shit. Writer/director Tim Brown is clearly trying to say something about the moral ambiguity between cops and criminals, but the movie is too dumb to articulate a coherent message.
Ron Perlman and Ernie Hudson are actually pretty solid in their supporting roles, but Jackie Earle Haley is oddly boring as an unhinged mob boss, a role that should be right up his alley. Cage does what he can, but the script just doesn’t give him much to do. There are too many characters and plot points, and the movie doesn’t focus on Cage’s character to the degree that it should.
Bonus Quote
Cage to granddaughter: “Well, I’m all out of cold cuts, but I do have some crunchy shit.”
Well, that about wraps it up. Now that Cage is out of debt, it’s possible that we won’t see this level of prolific output again. But the man clearly loves to work, and I’m excited to see what 2024 will bring now that he can choose his roles more carefully. If Dream Scenario is any indication, we have some cool shit coming our way.
Previous Nic Cage Rankings:
Every 2019 Nicolas Cage Movie, Ranked
Every 2020 Nicolas Cage Movie, Ranked
Every 2021 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.
