Watching Nicolas Cage add another notch to his belt of gonzo performances can be a movie’s main attraction. But it shouldn’t be all it has to offer — there ought to be some “there” there. Falling short in that regard is “Sympathy for the Devil,” a hazily familiar black comedy-cum-thriller with the star as a mystery man who carjacks Joel Kinnaman for a wild night’s ride.
Not wild enough, however, as Yuval Adler’s film seems to reprise elements from more distinctive road movies without settling on a consistent tone or persuasive narrative to call its own. Essentially a two-hander, Luke Paradise’s screenplay provides its leads with plenty of opportunity for histrionics; only a credible context and conviction are lacking. RLJE Films opens this just-passable diversion in limited U.S. theaters this Friday, July 28.
David Chamberlain (Kinnaman) is harried from the start, dropping a young son at grandma’s en route to the Las Vegas hospital where his pregnant wife is about to deliver — a source of more than usual concern, with the couple having lost another child in birth complications. But as he’s parking in the facility’s garage, a flamboyantly turned-out stranger (Cage) simply climbs into the backseat, ordering him at gunpoint to drive away. Pleas about his spouse’s status get our hero nowhere: “I’m your family emergency now,” crows this snarky, volatile intruder.
When not threatening harm, swilling from a flask, or riffing on whatever random subject comes to min , the nameless aggressor hints he knows things about David — that the latter once had a drinking problem himself, that they may have met previously in Boston, and so on. At one point the abductor claims he just wants to be driven to visit his dying mother at a hospital in another city. Yet it seems he’s really acting out some personal vendetta, though David appears baffled as to what that might be, or how they could have any prior connection.
The possibility that Mr. X is just playing some perverse game that will lead to no serious harm is extinguished when they’re stopped for speeding, an encounter with law enforcement that quickly turns violent. David tries various means of escape, to no avail. Stopping at a roadside diner, their already unpleasant dynamic gets a lot worse, with the stranger making it clear he’s perfectly willing to kill innocent bystanders if David doesn’t admit to some guilt he still has no apparent clue about.
With spiky dyed flame-red hair, goatee and lounge-lizard smoking jacket, Cage only needs a pair of plastic horns to look the complete costume-party Satan. And given the jokey way he treats the character for a long time, we do wonder if he’s meant to be a literal Beelzebub come to claim a sinner (whose identity he might be mistaken about) for eternal damnation. But this getup turns out to be no more than another vaudevillian distancing device for the actor, one that doesn’t particularly pay off this time. He’s gone through similar bags of tricks before, to greater effect — most recently just a couple of months ago, in “Renfield.”
The trouble isn’t just that “Sympathy’s” script seems to frequently nod towards other films without ever feeling like its own organic construct. More problematic still is that its mixed signals ultimately clash: What’s played (at least in Cage’s performance) as an ironic, over-the-top ride-along with a wacky madman is in the end meant to be taken seriously. Alas, there’s nothing convincing, let alone touching, about seeing this particular star abruptly shift from a prankish mode to a forced earnest one. Nor does Kinnaman fare any better as David reveals his own far-fetched hidden side. There’s zero depth, or even surprise, to the related late revelations — they’re 100% recycled pulp-fiction contrivance.
Israeli director Adler, who’s labored in more impersonal genre projects since his notable 2013 home-turf debut “Bethlehem,” does a good job keeping “Sympathy” fluid. Editor Alan Canant’s pace never slackens, the modest action sequences are competently handled, and DP Steven Holleran lends a certain neon-lit nocturnal stylishness to proceedings. There are some interesting soundtrack choices, notably oldies by Scott Walker and Alan Vega — though a singalong of disco diva Alicia Bridges’ “I Love the Nightlife” occurs a little too obviously for the sole purpose of again boosting Cage’s onscreen quirk quotient.
But the tension that should fire up this joint throughout never quite catches hold, because there are never any tangible stakes. These characters and their crisis remain just a premise, too incompletely worked out to either generate urgent suspense or enter the realm of surreal fantasia as Cage did in a long-ago road nightmare, “Wild at Heart.” Gesture as the filmmakers do in both those directions, their material keeps “Sympathy for the Devil” too artificial and uninspired to be anything more than just on the watchable side of mediocrity.