Dog Eat Dog

Criminals who have served their time and are legally deemed no longer a threat to society get back together to commit some more crimes. It goes about as well as you'd think, just with more drugs, more prostitution, and more buggy William Defoe eyes. I understand that Mr. Defoe and Mr. Cage are fine actors, but their portrayal of casual drug use and whoring was unsurprisingly natural. Wait, did I just say Nic Cage was a fine actor?

The prospect of Cage and Dafoe attempting to out-crazy each other in a Paul Schrader film is a tantalising one and for a while, it feels like all three will do something special to elevate this material. Unfortunately it winds up being just another ape of post-Tarantino, and while it remains engaging and (darkly) amusing throughout, you can't help but feel this is a missed opportunity. Schrader still handles the material quite well, occasionally harkening back to Scorsese and TAXI DRIVER.

Casting Dafoe and Cage as small time career criminals in a violent, nasty low budget crime film with a nihilistic edge should have been a winner that saved Schrader's career, but the end result is another dud, his 3rd in a row. It's a rushed and cheap looking affair that finds Schrader awkwardly aligning himself with the Tarantino generation two decades late. The throwback feel is not entirely unwelcome, but he has no clue how to shape the material into a compelling, or even coherent, form.

While the themes and talent hold promise, the script is an absolute disaster: an embarrassing litany of cliche, unnecessary subplots, voiceover narration, and uninvolving characters. Schrader should have rewritten the script to serve his own aims. All 33 points go toward a gonzo scene of Cage imitating Humphrey Bogart.

Ultra violent with no redeeming qualities.

Schrader really makes B-movies that feel like blockbusters (and sometimes vice-versa). If the Nic Cage Bogart sequence isn't CINEMA to you I dunno what is. Also https://i.imgur.com/h4c0wzx.png

Garbage. Unbelievable considering the talent involved. And Cage doesn't even freak out once!

Viewed January 5, 2017. I like the idea of Paul Schrader making movies in the 2010s, but I'm not sure I like the idea of me continuing to watch them. It's better than The Canyons, at least.

Doesn't know whether it wants to be the gritty pulp of Abel Ferrera or the metacinematic weirdness of Werner Herzog or the smutty camp of '70s John Waters. Whatever, it's a fucking mess all the same.

Some great individual moments without enough glue to hold them together.

gereksiz

total mess

A movie with Cage AND Dafoe doing drugs, fucking hookers and having food fights. This sounds so good to me. Too bad writing is really bad and apart from a few crazy, funny scenes the movie don't make sense. A lot of experimentation, like pink-tinted scene at the beginning, I didn't expect. Oh, and Cage doing Humphrey Bogart impression... Lets just say it's a shitty movie that made me so happy at the times.

This movie has a crazy and bizarre script. The actors are way over the top. There are a few interesting scenes but not enough to recommend the film.

watchable

This was a mess of a movie. That's what happens when you get a bunch of college filmmaker wannabes to write a script overnight. At very least it wasn't boring.

Tarantino meets John Waters meets Bogart, but I guess that's kinda always been Paul Schrader in a way--serious subject, homage galore, with a dose of camp. He must have some fucked up dreams. I don't know what to make of this. It's not good, it's not horrible, but it passed the time.

This was recommended as an odd noir film. This is advertised as a thriller, it's a moronic black comedy