Red Rock West

I saw this on a list of underrated/overlooked 90's movies, and the description and cast made me curious. I was concerned about the Nic Cage of it all. Which version of him would I get? Would his performance derail a good movie? Would he be the stand-out element in a sea of blandness? Fortunately, neither. Red Rock West turned out to be a lot of fun. I can see why it doesn't get talked about it, but that's not a knock on it. Cage plays Michael, a drifter looking for work, who rolls into the titular small town and is mistaken by a bartender (JT Walsh) for a hitman he's contracted to kill his wife (Lara Flynn Boyle). Michael takes the money with the intention of tipping off the wife and then skipping town with the money, but gets sucked into a maelstrom of overlapping deceits, the real hitman showing up (Dennis Hopper), and a peculiar inability to escape the town. Red Rock West's best asset is also the biggest reason it didn't get attention: its blending of genres. There's elements of western, noir, black comedy, and thriller to it, all intertwining, but not any of them more prevalent than the other, which puts it in a tough spot. How do you sell a movie like this, or explain it to a friend? It's quirky and weird and dedicated to playing by its own rules. It has a lot of guns in its arsenal, and it knows how and when to pull each trigger, bringing a moment of dark levity here, leaning on the noir aspects there, and mixing it all together when it makes sense. Red Rock West really is a tightrope walk of styles and tones. And Nic Cage is the perfect person to put in the middle of all this. He never goes full Nic Cage, but he does have some outbursts, and they're strategically placed for maximum effect. He very much feels like the aimless, faceless drifter he's meant to be. And Dennis Hopper is having a blast, chewing through scenery like Pac-Man chewing dots as a slick, modern-day cowboy assassin with oodles of charm. It is with the other two principal cast members, though, that the movie might not be all it could be. The late JT Walsh, who I've always felt didn't get his just due, does a fantastic job as the scheming husband Wayne, but that excellence is tempered by who he's cast to play. I have a hard time believing him and Lara Flynn Boyle are a couple. What he sees in her, okay, young and pretty, easy to manipulate, fine ... but the other way around is where it loses me about. He's not charming at all. He's a walking relationship red flag. And then there's Boyle on her own, who just isn't right. She's not bad, but she has neither the sultry mystery of a classic noir femme fatale, nor does she have the girl-next-door sweetness to play the damsel in distress. It's funny, because this movie is so damned quirky, and Boyle came from a quirky TV show in Twin Peaks, and yet, any of her three contemporaries on the show -- Sherilyn Fenn, Madchen Amick, or Sheryl Lee -- would've made better choices for the role. She's not bad, but she doesn't have the haunting mystery of Fenn, the girl-next-door sweetness of Lee, or the off-the-charts, raw sexual magnetism of Amick. Not that Boyle is bad, but she's got traces of what the others have in droves. Weird casting choices aside, Red Rock West is a fun blend of genres that deserves to be seen. It doesn't overstay its welcome (barely 90 minutes!), it has a tangled web that isn't convoluted, and it's both similar to and unlike anything you've seen. It's not perfect, but it nails what its trying to do.