Il nemico invisibile

Nicolas Cage is Evan Lake, a dedicated veteran CIA agent in the last stages of his career. He has been riding a desk for the last years and does not like it. The most elevating moments are the motivational speeches he is asked to do for the new CIA agents in training.

When the trail of an old enemy, presumed dead for decades, surfaces and coincides with Lake being diagnosed with a terminal form of dementia, the choice is easy. He is going to settle one last score.

The story has some potential, but unfortunately the movie never gets past the B-movie predicate.

The ear I mentioned in the summary seems to live a life of it's own. My attention kept being drawn to it. In one of his battles with terrorists, Cage's character gets tortured. He gets a cut in his ear. After twenty years the cut is still there and looks very awkward. At some point I swear I could see the edges of the cut move together and mouth some words to Cage. After rewinding I thought I faintly heard these words: "Nicolas, get out of here, you are too good for this. Save your career before its too late!"

This isn't a spy movie it's a disaster movie and the disaster is the movie. The only high points are when the no longer remotely sexy but nevertheless intelligent and interesting Irène Jacob appears. It makes you realize that there is a woman who has Helen Mirren or Charlotte Rampling potential (that's the interesting part). Some may object that Mirren and Rampling are still hot. Then Jacob is definitely your gal. Me, I enjoy their conversation, not their decrepitude.

Anton Yelchin is totally miscast and his part is a train wreck. First he's a nerdy eager beaver goody two shoes then he suddenly becomes a totally unconvincing cold Rambo killer, except when he has to physically engage the bad guy, at which point he reverts to the nerdy 70-pound weakling. His mousy baby face is suited to neither of those roles and he doesn't manage to pull off the innocent-looking tough guy act; in fact it seems never to have occurred to him to try.

As for Nick Cage, he takes his usual gawky, brooding, bipolar demeanor to its logical conclusion and totally loses it, both as the character he plays and the way he plays him. He is all over the place.

The movie as a whole has a Walmart look, as if the producers anticipated that it would bomb and cut costs to the bone. No doubt that's why it is located in, or rather outsourced to, Romania.

The rest of the cast and the thin, thin plot of the movie, the less said the better off we are all.

The big story associated with this film is that its director, Paul Schrader, was locked out of the editing room and denied final cut. Subsequently, Schrader and the stars have disowned this version. However, despite their reaction out of principle, DYING OF THE LIGHT isn't that terrible. It's merely underwhelming. Nicolas Cage gives a decent performance as Evan Lake, a veteran CIA agent with recently diagnosed dementia. Upon receiving some intelligence which indicates that a former target may still be alive, he decides to go after them before his disease puts him out of commission permanently. At its core, this film has an interesting concept that is never fully realized to its full thematic potential: two nemeses have one final reckoning while each are battling a debilitating disease. From what I saw, Nicolas Cage put in some good character work, and even gets to "rage" a little bit, but he was still hampered by an editing job that seemed to be going for a more streamlined thriller. Due to this, it felt like there was a fair amount of character development missing, mostly from supporting players but also from Cage himself. His disease doesn't take as big of a role as you might think, given its severity. As far as the rest of the cast is concerned, everyone did a good job but they really weren't given a whole lot to work with. Anton Yelchin was the only other name actor I recognized, and his presence seemed rather perfunctory. Perhaps he would have had a larger role in Paul Schrader's cut, but we'll probably never know unless it gets released on Blu-ray/DVD. All of the technical aspects of the film were good, although it did have the rather depressing color palette associated with low-budget Eastern European thrillers. The editing in the fight scenes was a bit choppy, but the camera-work was OK for the most part otherwise. The score also wasn't too memorable, but it still fit the material to a degree. The only part of it I genuinely liked was the track that played over the closing credits. Overall, I wasn't expecting a masterpiece and of course I didn't get one. However, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be either, somewhat to its detriment. Scenes began and then ended without much incident and didn't contribute much to the overall story. A part of me wished that it was worse because at least then it would be memorable. What I got was purely middle-of-the-road and, dare I say it, a little dull. Those looking for a fired-up Nicolas Cage performance should look elsewhere. You'd be perfectly justified in skipping this.

This is a dark movie. Not only for its content; it's literally dim for most of the movie. I guess it's meant to provide an atmosphere that parallels what is happening in Evan Lake's (Nicolas Cage) mind, and the murky atmosphere is one of the few things Dying of the Light has going for it. The plot is this: Lake works for the C.I.A. and is experiencing some mental twitches in his old age like hallucinations, lapses in memory, and the works, which obviously isn't ideal for a C.I.A. operative, so he has to go rogue. He has flashbacks to a mission he was part of that scarred his psyche - he was tortured for information, and flashbacks to this scene happen over the course of the movie, and Evan won't stop until he finds and kills his former captor. Nicolas Cage carries this movie on his shoulders because his character is really the only semi-developed part about it. Granted, one interesting character is not nearly enough to save this gloomy mess of a film.

I can't blame writer/director Paul Schrader because he and the producers had some sort of fallout and the producers ended up changing a bunch of stuff in post-production, so I blame the producers. The editing is horrendous, the action sequences are intermittent and awkward, no character other than Cage's is interesting in the least, some scenes are too melodramatic, others are just dull. I mean you can tell this movie has more layers than it lets on, but it never goes deep beneath the surface like you want it to. It plays it relatively safe and straightforward despite having an interesting premise and an empathetic protagonist.

Now, Nicolas Cage can definitely pull off the salt-and-pepper look. Especially when he goes full on Arab (or whatever it was) with a badass goatee and tinted glasses. He really encapsulates the part of Evan, and it's by far the deepest and most flawed character Cage has portrayed in a while. The problem is that we don't see enough of him. We don't have a chance to get attached to this character on more than a surface level because the pacing of this movie is so terrible. On a scene-by-scene basis, it's extremely hard to keep track of what's going on, of what's important and what isn't. It just becomes a headache after a while and you just want to see Cage kick some ass, and he kind of does, for like a minute anyway.

The climax is incredibly underwhelming. It's just like, here, this is the end. There's no impact. No reason to care. The antagonist is garbage. Cage's sidekick is boring. None of it is memorable. The movie has so many cool ideas that it alludes to (Evan's dementia and how it impacts his work) that are never delved into deeper. I wanted to hear more monologues from Cage - more scenes of just him battling his psyche. Anything to pull this movie from boredom. Unfortunately, it never happens.

This movie isn't worth it. Even for die hard Cage fans such as myself, Dying of the Light is hard to sit through despite an engaging performance by Cage. Any time Cage is off-screen, the movie loses all intrigue. That's not a good sign. If only a director's cut was able to see the light of day, then maybe the Dying of the Light wouldn't be such a tedious mess. As it stands, it's just a very forgettable misfire of a film.

This film is written and directed by one of my favorite filmmakers working today, Paul Schrader. He's most famous for writing Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. However, he also wrote Bringing Out the Dead and directed Dog Eat Dog which I both love and both star Nicolas Cage. The weird thing is that neither Paul Schrader or Nic Cage wants you to see this movie. This is because the Dying of the LIght was taken away from the filmmakers and re-edited by the producers without Paul Scharders approval. He claims that he was literally locked out of the editing room while producers edited the film to their liking.

There are points in this film where it truly shows. The version we got is so on and off. There were scenes where I was completely invested in what was unfolding in front of me and other scenes where it was so dull that I just wanted to pass out. The film has great ideas, but it just doesn't do enough with them and when it does something good, the next scene undoes it. At the end of the film, something happens which I found exceptionally impactful and powerful and could have been a great ending, but the next scene completely stabs us in the back and reverses that decision.

The editing is unpleasantly sloppy in places which is most apparent during a brief action sequence halfway through the movie. The main character is also fascinating and while Nicolas Cage does a great job, he just isn't explored enough.

There is a great film here but it just doesn't make it's way to the surface. What is at the surface is a strange mixture of great and bad. Some scenes in this film or fantastic and some are trash. I hope Paul Schrader's version of the film gets released because I'm positive it is much better than what we got here.