REVIEW: Nicolas Cage vehicles nowadays can be divided up into two categories. First, there are the low-budget potboilers, like THE HUMANITY BUREAU or 211, which exploit his remaining star power but offer little to make them stand out in his filmography. Then, there are the legit Cage movies, the interesting indie stuff that proves he’s a good as he ever was, movies like THE TRUST, MANDY, the recent COLOR OUT OF SPACE, MOM & DAD, and a few others. RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL, with its starry ensemble cast and premise was likely intended to be the latter, but clumsy execution makes it more like one of the more disposable entries into his cannon.
The feature debut of writer-director Jason Cabell, RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL is more of an ensemble than is being advertised, with Cage’s role just a glorified supporting turn given his billing. Aiming for a sprawling, TRAFFIC style narrative that tracks the cocaine from its harvest by farmers (including Clifton Collins Jr.) through it being cut and prepared for the streets, with Barry Pepper the corporate overlord supervising it all out of Vancouver, this is ambitious, but too often falls flat.
For one thing, it’s too familiar. Everyone’s role feels recycled from better movies. Nicolas Cage is essentially playing Walter White, as the bespectacled family man who runs a pizza business as a front for moving coke. Leslie Bibb’s driven agent on his trail is very reminiscent of Emily Blunt in SICARIO, while Cole Hauser, as the quiet gunman sent to move things along seems to be a take on Benicio Del Toro in that same film, minus the authenticity.
It’s also highly uneven, with it taking a good half hour for Cabell to introduce all of the players, most of whom are offscreen for the second act. The much-hyped Laurence Fishburne–Nicolas Cage pairing only happens in the third act and is over too quickly, although Fishburne is funny as the drug-addled pusher who bites off more than he can chew when he decides to cut the stuff with some fentanyl.
All of this should have added up to an intriguing yarn, but it doesn’t come together well at all, despite Cage giving a subtler performance than usual, and Fishburne having fun playing against type. It’s not helped by the low budget, with fire CGI used in a few scenes that are so bad you’d swear you’re watching a student film –a tell-tale sign of post-production tampering. I did like the wacky, intense musical score by RUN LOLA RUN’s Reinhold Heil and some of the song choices, including Lo Fidelity Allstars “Battleflag” in the intro. Had it had a bigger budget, there’s no doubt RUNNING WITH THE DEVIL would have been a better film, and it’s proof that you really can’t do movies like this on the cheap. It’s not awful, but it’s not what it could have been.