The 2017 Stinker Arsenal Is Pure Dreck With the Exception of Nicolas Cage's Crazed Villain Turn
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
In a different world John Travolta would have re-teamed with Face/Off star Nicolas Cage in Terence Malick’s sprawling 1998 masterpiece The Thin Red Line and/or the 2013 flop Killing Season.
It was not to be, however. From what I’ve read the only reason that Cage did not join every other actor in the world in the cast of The Thin Red Line was because Malick didn’t have Cage’s phone number. Seriously. That prevented our greatest living actor from collaborating with a dude who has made some good movies.
I previously would have called Malick one of our greatest auteurs but he apparently made some real stinkers so I’m bumping him down to “dude who made some good movies.”
The version of Killing Season that would have reunited Cage and Travolta under the direction of Die Hard’s John McTiernan fell apart, however, and the film was eventually made with Robert De Niro as the other lead and Mark Steven Johnson, the gritty auteur behind Simon Birch and Daredevil, directing.
It’s ostensibly still not too late for Travolta and Cage to work together again but Cage has managed to collaborate repeatedly with John Cusack without anyone noticing or caring.
The first time Cage and Cusack teamed up it was for the 1997’s Con Air, a masterpiece of All-American vulgarity and a highlight in both men’s voluminous filmographies.
The next two times Cage and Cusack shared the screen it was in Redbox cheapies that reflected the dire state of both men’s careers.
With 2013’s The Frozen Ground you can at least see why Cusack and Cage might have looked at the project and seen something different and better than the interchangeable direct-to-video dreck they were cranking out at the time.
The film was a chilly biopic about Robert Hansen, a terrifying real-life serial killer who maintained a facade of banal normality as a successful baker and family men while hunting, torturing and murdering sex workers. Think Ned Flanders but a monstrous mass murderer.
It’s a fascinating story as well as a cautionary warning of the dangers of misogyny in both its institutional and individual form. With another film with another screenplay in a different dimension, the seemingly juicy part of Hansen could have been an Oscar role.
Instead Cusack spends the entire film with an annoyed expression that silently but powerfully conveys, “I sure do hope no one finds out that I’ve been torturing and murdering sex workers. I could get into a lot of trouble for that.”
Cage and Cusack team up pointlessly a third time in 2017’s Arsenal. Cusack spends most of his limited screen time wearing sunglasses that make it seem like he’s trying unsuccessfully to hide his participation in the movie He seems to think that if he keeps his shades on no one will realize that the star of Say Anything, High Fidelity and Being John Malkovich has a nothing role in an instantly forgettable Adrian Grenier vehicle.
I don’t know what Cusack is doing in the film beyond picking up anywhere from a half million dollars to a million bucks for a few days work. Cusack’s involvement feels purely mercenary on both sides. The schlock merchants who put this out realized that a DVD box with Cusack’s head alongside that of Cage’s and Grenier’s would be a much bigger draw than one with just Cage and Grenier.
I know exactly what Cage is doing in Arsenal. He’s doing his crazy Nicolas Cage shtick. And when I mean crazy I mean crazy. Remember when Cage slapped on a prosthetic nose and costume shop Beatlemania wig to play a scuzzy criminal who was like Tony Clifton on crystal methamphetamines in 1993’s Deadfall?
No, you don’t? That’s understandable. It’s a movie that only matters to Cage cultists like myself and fans of the Travolta/Cage podcast. Cage doesn’t just have a role like the one he played in Deadfall; he literally is playing the exact same role.
That’s right: Cage inexplicably played crazed libertine Eddie King in the obscure 1993 trash treasure Deadfall. Twenty four years later he reprised the role, complete with the fake nose and an accent that suggests a lifelong N’Awlins resident with a mouth full of peanut butter.
Why is Cage bringing back a character from an obscure film no one remembers? I don’t know. Cage is a bit of a character. Some of his choices I would describe as eccentric. I would describe every choice Cage makes in Arsenal as eccentric, beginning with his decision to appear in this lukewarm garbage in the first place.
Arsenal opens with a lengthy, pointless prologue establishing the hardscrabble Southern childhoods of Mikey and JP Lindel, who will go on to be played by Adrian Grenier and Johnathon Schaech.
The brothers are a study in contrasts. JP grows up to be entirely good, a family man and businessman and his brother’s keeper. Also, since he’s played by the sentient mannequin who starred in the Entourage movie he’s extremely bland.
Mikey, however, is what is colloquially known as a real piece of shit. He’s just the fucking worse. He’s a small time criminal, drunk and terrible dad who is terrible in every facet of his life.
But Mikey is family and did his younger brother some favors during their formative years that he never forgot. Also, being the best person in the world, JP feels duty-bound to keep his brother out of trouble, which is a full-time job on top of his full-time job being a wealthy entrepreneur.
When Mikey gets out of the hoosegow his brother gives him ten thousand dollars for his daughter’s braces that he instead spends on a sizable amount of cocaine that is promptly stolen.
This puts him on the radar of Sal (Cusack), a street smart detective who warns JP of the trouble his brother is in.
When JP is kidnapped for a three hundred and fifty thousand dollar ransom some folks suspect that it was an inside job.
The madman behind the abduction is of course Eddie King, who has been terrorizing and traumatizing the family since they were kids.
Arsenal is like Uma Thurman’s character in Pulp Fiction after she overdoses on heroin. It’s comatose. It’s barely alive. It just lies there, lifeless and inert.
Cage’s performance is like a shot of adrenaline that makes the movie come alive but only briefly. As is often the case, Cage is in a different, more entertaining movie than everyone else. He’s in a crazed b movie with energy, momentum and wackadoo personality.
His performance begins at 11 and stays there for the rest of the film. He is entirely too much but his kookiness isn’t anywhere near enough to save this DOA stinker.
Like The Frozen Ground, Arsenal is weirdly racist. It illustrates that Mikey’s teen daughter is going down a bad path because she’s getting high in a cheap hotel room with a black man. When she politely rejects his offer to let her hit his pipe he calls her a bitch and punches her in the face. Then she’s saved by a white night in the form of her heroic uncle.
This would not stand out as much if the character wasn’t literally the only person of color in the movie and his role didn’t last for about a minute.
There is no reason to see Arsenal aside from another opportunity to see my favorite actor go Nicolas Cage all over yet another shitty movie.
In an unsurprising turn of events this was produced by Randall Emmett, the monster behind many of Bruce Willis, Nicolas Cage, John Travolta and Robert De Niro’s worst late-period movies. He’s been very good for their pocketbooks and very bad for their souls and their creative integrity.
Miller is the reason Bruce Willis made TWELVE movies last year. He is the true villain of these movies even if he never appears onscreen, just like the Weinsteins were the real bad guys of every Miramax movie they produced.
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