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!"

Nicolas Cage has done quite a lot of movies recently. Not all have a certain quality, so considering that, this movie is not that bad. It's improbable and unlikely and a lot of other things too, but when you hear his speech (full of clichés, but nevertheless) almost at the beginning of the movie, you can't help but see the actor shining through. There is still fight left in this "old dog" (no offense to Nic, quite the contrary actually).

Talking about fight, this is about stubbornness and unlikely allies (Yelchin, whose true motives remain unclear to me, other than him being nice ... maybe Cages character reminds him of his dad?), but also about figuring how to let go (or not) of the past. There are some nice touches to this, that can make it worthwhile, but you'll have to decide if this is something you wanna watch (make-up effects are good on Cages face)

As with, well let's be honest, all of Nicolas Cage movies, then I am sitting down to watch the movie with very little expectations, because there is an overshadowing tendency that his movies turn out to be generic and cut from overly used recipes. And should it turn out to be that particular movie that surprises, once in a blue moon, then it is that much more pleasant to watch.

However, "Dying of the Light" is one of those types of movies that has potential to be interesting, but it was squandered at the hands of director Paul Schrader. The movie turned out to be a very predictable and thus very generic movie for the thriller/drama genre.

The acting in the movie was as to be expected. You have your ever-present single facial expression and random outbursts of loud voicing from Nicolas Cage. And he seemed like a fish out of water in this movie, trying to portray a government employee diagnosed with a debilitating mental illness.

The movie follows a generic script and storyline, which has been seen and used in countless other movies prior to this 2014 movie. As such, then there is very little new to be had for the audience that actually do take the time to sit down and watch "Dying of the Light". And while it was scripted, then the movie also progressed way too fast, which essentially made the movie seemed forced and shallow.

You know what you are getting yourself into here if you take a minute to read the synopsis, and with the thought of it being another one of the assembly line produced Nicolas Cage movies. And I can't claim to say that this particular movie is outstanding from the numerous other movies that Nicolas Cage stars in. As such, then I am rating "Dying of the Light" a mere four out of ten stars.

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.

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.