The Worst of Nicolas Cage

Welcome to the weekend everyone, it's time for another special post from the Tagline! Today I thought I would deal with a very serious subject this weekend, bring it down a notch, and so I'm going to be talking about Nicolas Cage. Mr. Cage has wooed and wowed us over the years, as a variety of crazy people, doing very strange things. Sometimes however, those crazy people are not wowing or wooing. Sometimes they are just crazy people. Over the years the frequency of the latter category seems to have increased, and we have all begun to suspect I think that these are not characters at all, but simply Nicolas Cage, in real life. Without further ado, I give you!

THE Top 5 Worst Roles of Nicolas Cage

This is the only face Nicolas Cage ever makes.

#5)Ghost Rider: That's right, we are moving downward from Ghost Rider. Ghost Rider is the best thing happening in this post. For that I am truly sorry. Based on the Marvel comics character of the same name, Ghost Rider is a movie about Johnny Blaze, a stunt rider who sells his soul to the devil so that his father's cancer would be cured. Like all deals with the devil, Johnny gets screwed, and then years later Mephisto (see the devil) returns, demanding that Johnny fulfills his contract by acting as his bounty hunter, the ghost rider. He does so, squaring off against Blackheart, Mephisto's son, who seeks to empower himself so he can make Earth hell or something. The movie features some Grade D Nick Cage acting, a variety of lame effects,  and a bunch of characters that are as cliched as they are uninteresting. That being said, the plot is simple and to the point, and there is a flaming-skulled biker on a motorcycle. So that's pretty good. Despite how dumb it was, Ghost Rider also grossed very well, 228 million against a 110 million dollar budget.

Behold the dignity. The austere poise of Mr. Cage.

#4)G-Force: Once again, here we have the smash Jerry Bruckheimer action hit G-Force, about a team of animated secret agent rodents, mostly guinea pigs, fighting against sinister forces. Nicolas Cage here plays a star-nosed mole named Speckles, who act as the cyber-intelligence for the team. I don't think I need to explain why this movie is on the list. Movies about CG animals are almost categorically bad. I don't care if Jerry Bruckheimer directs them. He directed Kangaroo Jack too, and I might never forgive him for that. There might be exceptions to this rule, but none spring readily to mind (note that movies about cartoon animals are generally fair game. It's when you mix in live action actors with talking CG animals that you generally end up with Alvin and the Chipmunks). I guess Nick's only real culpability here is that he actually decided to be in this movie. For shame sir, for shame.

Wow Nick, those are some cool shades you have there.

#3)Drive Angry: Nicolas Cage can't seem to get away from playing roles where he is from hell, being chased by the devil and his agents. Drive Angry features this theme which maybe Nick thought was his real life after he starred in Ghost Rider. Drive Angry then is about a guy named John Milton (groan) who breaks out from Hell to kill some cult leader that tricked his daughter into joining his cult, killing her and planning to use his granddaughter in a Satanic ritual. Milton is joined along the way by white trash Piper (Amber Heard, most recently in the Rum Diary). The movie is stupid, offensive, loud, and full of senseless shit happening that I can't always give good explanation for. It also manages to be pretty boring in some parts. Also Milton uses a gun called Godkiller, which made me feel like maybe I was playing some sort of extreme action video game instead of watching a movie starring Nicolas fucking Cage. When I saw the previews for this movie, I had not an inkling it was full of supernatural shit, so that came as a real surprise. That was unfortunately the only surprise. Drive Angry did pisspoor in the box office, grossing 28 million against its 50 million dollar budget.

You'd like to think there's an explanation for this and
there is. Nicolas Cage is a lunatic.

#2)The Wicker Man:  Chances are, if you have ever been on the internet, you already know all about the Wicker Man, and the bees in his eyes, and questioning how it got burned. This film was a remake of a British film of the same name made in the '70s, only that was considered to be an excellent movie, whereas Nicolas Cage's rendition is one of the single most insane things that I have ever watched in my life. I once watched a highlight reel on Youtube, that was just a string of totally crazy things happening, and Nicolas Cage punching (or in one case kicking) a whole lot of ladies. I figured that there had to be a good explanation for all of the ladypunching, one instance of which involved him wearing a bear suit. Then I watched the movie, and discovered that there was no explanation for any of these things. Nicolas Cage plays a cop who pursues a lady he loves to an island of all ladies, and then he basically goes crazy and starts beating ladies up to try and find out where his maybe daughter is, and then he gets burned alive and covered in bees for some reasons so the ladies can have more honey or something. I don't even want to talk about this movie anymore. This was again a financial failure, netting 38 million against its estimated 40 million dollar budget.

The only thing dangerous is that ridiculous wig.

#1)Bangkok Dangerous:  Here we reach the glorious peak of Nicolas Cage's wall of achievement, the monumentally pointless and depressing Bangkok Dangerous, a movie about a hitman who goes to Bangkok to kill some people for a ganglord, but then he changes his mind and kills a whole bunch of other people and the ganglord instead. If you've noticed, Nicolas Cage has several movies on this list where he is an amoral psychopath who kills big crowds of people, but then is also kind of good and mostly they are bad people that he kills. This movie's plot is completely pointless, there are no characters you care about or even like, and the ending is both depressing and stupid. I can't emphasize enough that you should never see this movie. It somehow grossed 42 million dollars against a 45 million dollar budget. That is sad, but at least it was a failure right?

And that's it! There are plenty of other stupid and crazy movies that Nicolas Cage starred in, but these were the worst in my opinion. Join me on Tuesday, when I talk about The Possession, a movie that does not have Nicolas Cage in it.

It's gonna get a little gross.