A CHILLING PARENT TRAP
Mom and Dad unleashes unexpected horror ... not to mention Nicolas Cage
Watching this insane familyvalues horror, I couldn’t decide whether “committed” describes how Nicolas Cage acts, or merely what should be done with him. When it comes to emotional extremes the guy can turn on a dime, and it feels like Mom and Dad’s US$4-million budget came entirely in rolls of 10-cent coins. The premise is simple. Some kind of virus is making parents turn on their children with murderous intent.
It’s a clever concept from writer-director Brian Taylor (Crank, Gamer).
Movies are full of killer children, either born evil or possessed by demons, but the flip side is relatively rare.
It’s as if a zombie flick featured the undead providing earthquake relief. Or if Michael Haneke made a charming documentary about an otter who befriends a pot-bellied pig.
Cage and Selma Blair star as the Ryans, a suburban cookiecutter couple with two kids (Anne Winters and Zackary Arthur), a maid (Sharon Gee) and enough mid-life angst to fill their basement, attic, backyard shed and garage.
When filicidal mania starts sweeping the country, their kids are at school, so they’re not aware of the problem.
That’ll change soon enough. You also sense that a relative’s pregnancy won’t end well.
Taylor opens with a soothing Glen Campbell song before uncaging Nicolas and letting the soundtrack descend into weird synthesizer tracks. But for all the craziness inherent in the intergenerational mayhem, the film soon starts to drag.
Taylor, perhaps constrained by budget more than creativity, chooses to go small, with the kids trapped in the basement and the parents plotting how to get at them. (Picture Home Alone without the Alone.)
Cage gives it his all, and then some — there’s a bizarre and lengthy flashback to the pool table he was building — but the film’s downward spiral proves stronger than his hysteria.
Perhaps the problem is that he pitches his character so wildly that we can picture him going off the deep end even without the screenplay’s push.
Cage’s career has long had that feel about it; even if no one had hired him to play Ghost Rider, you can almost imagine him rigging up a flaming suit and taking off on a motorcycle, movie be damned.