THRILLER; 1hr 39min
STARRING: Nicolas Cage, Julian McMahon
No day at the beach: Cage (foreground) and Little
The title of writer Thomas Wolfe’s 1940 novel You Can Never Go Home Again could also easily double as the logline for Nicolas Cage’s latest trip to Crazytown. Leaving the past alone is a sentiment that Cage’s Surfer regrettably doesn’t share. In fact, he is hell-bent on digging himself right back in there, relocating from years in California with his teenage son (Finn Little) to the Australian surfing beach of his boyhood (actually Yallingup in Western Australia, although the location is also never named).
The cresting waves sparkle like the mirage they are and the Surfer is thrilled to be back for the five or so minutes it takes him to grasp that absolutely nobody wants him there. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” is the mantra of the pig-headed locals, never mind that “here” is where the disconcerted Surfer was born. The dude is doomed from soup to nuts, nuts being the operative word for both the feral cult of alphas (under the stewardship of a creepily genial McMahon) and any outsider foolhardy enough to mess with them.
Bit by excruciating bit, the Surfer loses his surfboard, his sunnies, his shoes, his phone, his watch, his wedding ring, his rental car and, arguably, his mind. He is attacked verbally and/or physically by almost every person and animal he encounters, dog and rat included, while being airily patronised by a local cop (Justin Rosniak). Yet still he hangs in, mule-stubborn and half mad, haunted by his history and ravaged by thirst, hunger, heat and rage while refusing no matter what to say die, which by now you’ll be thinking has to be where all this is headed.
Cage (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) has always taken commitment to the nth degree and in director Lorcan Finnegan and screenwriter Thomas Martin he has two fellow travellers equally up for whatever hallucinatory hijinks the bending of reality into derangement entails. It’s impossible to picture any other actor smashing every conceivable parameter with such wholeheartedly desperate panache.
