How did the writer of Taxi Driver serve up this dog’s dinner?
Dog Eat Dog
18 Cert, 91 min
Dir Paul Schrader Starring Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe, Christopher Matthew Cook, Melissa Bolona.
Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe as a pair of floundering ex-cons plotting the abduction of a baby? Dog Eat Dog, set in some godforsaken corner of Cleveland, Ohio, sure sounds like low-down, dirty fun. The source is a novel by jailbird-laureate Eddie Bunker, who played Mr Blue in Reservoir Dogs, and wrote Runaway Train (1985) and the underrated, Dafoe-starring prison flick Animal Factory (2000).
The problem, unfortunately, is who’s calling the shots on this occasion. Paul Schrader’s last few movies, bottoming out with the Lindsay Lohan/James Deen sex drama The Canyons (2013), have been barely released or releasable. It’s hard to tell who’s doing whom a favour here, but even Schrader – who has given us some of the most tortured psyches in cinema, from Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle onwards – admits it’s not a film worth weighing in your mind that hard. What the holy heck is up with the style choices? It starts with a luridly pink druggy prologue, as Dafoe’s character wigs out in his girlfriend’s house, then stabs her to death in a paranoid frenzy and shoots her hapless daughter in the head.
Schrader is aggressively flaunting his film’s straight-to-hell shock value, but tinkers around with so many berserk shifts in register that it can’t settle on a driving idea, let alone a tone. There’s half an argument that this schlocky low-life caper energises its director’s visual imagination more than we’ve seen lately, but it’s not a juggling feat he can keep up all day.
Kitted out in an aquamarine pimp suit that’s meant to be his character’s last vestige of bling, Cage ought to dominate this crazy operation, so it’s disappointing that he’s stuck with the altogether duller duty of narrating it. Unlike Dafoe or Christopher Matthew Cook as reprobate Diesel, he’s on weirdly good behaviour – and still not able to tap into a headspace worth occupying.
Raspy and never more bug-eyed, Dafoe has more fun with the hairtrigger psycho part, but he’s still way off his unforgettable Bobby Peru in David Lynch’s Wild At Heart. As the trio stake everything on the Lindbergh-style scheme of snatching an infant from its crib, Schrader had a chance to salvage a tight genre exercise, at least. But he’s perversely uninterested in the specifics, frittering away their time and ours visiting strip-clubs and dropping in on local hookers.
We get the idea that these three are damned, sunk in sordid despondency, barely fit for a movie. It’s just not much of an idea, or much of a way to sell it.