Nicolas Cage is an actor who has experienced more career resets than any of his peers; he’s reinvented himself every few years. Before nepotism became a dirty word, Cage earned his first roles thanks to his uncle Francis Ford Coppola, who offered him a platform to show his range in cult classics like Rumble Fish and Peggy Sue Got Married. It was soon that the young heartthrob of Valley Girl and Moonstruck became the notoriously meticulous method actor who won an Academy Award for his riveting depiction of alcoholism in Leaving Las Vegas, and soon developed collaborations with Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and Brian De Palma.
That version of Cage may have earned the same venerated status as Daniel Day-Lewis or Ralph Fiennes had he stayed within a prestige block, but the seductions of Hollywood blockbusters proved irresistible. Cage developed an aptitude for the wildest, most unapologetically maximalist action films the 1990s saw; when compared to the heights of The Rock, Face/Off, or Con Air, today’s crop of superhero films look bland and feckless. If Cage could still prove himself to be an undeniable presence when asked to star in Charlie Kaufman’s offbeat Adaptation or Ridley Scott’s dark comedy Matchstick Men, he also dug himself into a financial hole that resulted in a strange period of ironic appreciation and self-parody.
It was around 2011 that Cage began appearing in a half-dozen films a year, a majority of which were released directly on home media or VOD. These B-movies had indistinguishable titles like Trespass, Stolen, Rage, Arsenal, and Primal; eventually, they’d develop more audacious monikers like Looking Glass, The Humanity Bureau, Dog Eat Dog, The Humanity Bureau, and Dying of the Light. This generation of Cage films earned an audience based on the guarantee that the Oscar-winner would do something ridiculous and inadvertently hilarious in each title.
Cage isn’t the only former A-lister who found himself in tough times, as other actors of his generation like John Travolta, John Cusack, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone have also made frequent appearances in the peculiar subgenre of genre films that earned the nickname “geezer teasers.” However, Cage is the only one who hasn’t continuously phoned it in; if Travolta sleepwalked his way through an incompetent mob film like Gotti, Cage has delivered the type of over-the-top performances that make trash like The Trust or Outcast worth watching when they inevitable pop up for free on a streaming service.
It was only a matter of time before Cage’s experimental period attracted the attention of more serious artists, and he experienced a minor comeback at the beginning of the decade. In addition to scoring his best reviews in years for his heartbreaking role in Pig, Cage appeared as a fictionalized version of himself in the satire The Unbreakable Weight of Massive Talent and became the basis for a successful viral marketing campaign for the horror film Longlegs. The reality that Cage still isn’t able to single-handedly open a film isn’t an indication of his faded star power, but of the state of Hollywood; when new releases that star Matt Damon, George Clooney, and Margot Robbie flop at the box office, there’s little likelihood that an actor of Cage’s generation would incite an audience to trek out to the theater.
Although it’s ironic that Cage has begun to take himself seriously at the same time Hollywood’s willingness to greenlight original films slows down, he hasn’t shown any signs of distress. In the same year that Cage scored a role in both the acclaimed surrealist horror thriller Mandy and a voiceover part in the animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, he appeared in multiple VOD B-movies that clocked an average Rotten Tomatoes score of 21 percent.
Cage has reached a point in which it would be impossible to embarrass him. His latest film The Surfer could sell itself as a cheap midnight movie that saw Cage doing battle with toxic surfer bros on the coast of Australia. Had the film spectacularly failed and collapsed under the weight of its ideas, it likely still would have appeased audiences hooked on this era of Cage. However, Australian filmmaker Lorcan Finnegan pulled off something with The Surfer, which made use of Cage’s frantic sensibilities.
Before it's transformed into a violent, sun-drenched spectacle of blood and bullets, The Surfer is among Cage’s most grounded recent performances because he’s allowed to play a father. His unnamed character is on a vacation to Luna Bay with his teenage son (Finn Little), but his attempt to rekindle their faded relationship is thwarted by the presence of an obnoxious group of surf gurus with a particular animosity towards non-natives. Cage’s character had made his way to the beach in a Lexus, and a few brief phone calls establish that he’s employed in the real estate business. Perhaps The Surfer is a metaphor for the occupation of indigenous territory by uncultured assimilators, but in all likelihood, it's an excuse for Cage to lose his mind as he’s disrespected by spray-tanned Australian narcissists.
Finnegan’s style is one centered on dread; more terrifying than a few gangly locals is the concept of being lost in foreign soil without any means of communication or transportation. It’s to Cage’s credit that he’s able to keep himself bottled up for the first two-thirds of the film, which results in a final act that suitably goes off the rails. The Surfer may have had to mask itself as a less interesting version of what it really is, but it may earn its star some points among those who have long since dipped out on his work.