The Nicolas Cage Roulette Challenge, Part 2: TRESPASS (2011)

I suppose it was a coincidence that the first two Nicolas Cage movies to come up for Nicolas Cage roulette are thrillers of the caliber that usually go straight to video, but somehow have above-average production values, a veteran director, and an A-list cast.  Here is Trespass, starring Cage and Nicole Kidman, both of whom have won Oscars.  The director is Joel Schumacher: not the most beloved, especially among comic book fans, but still the man behind some truly memorable films (The Lost Boys, Flatliners, The Client).  The producer is Irwin Winkler, who produced Goodfellas, Raging Bull, and Rocky.  The cinematographer is Andrzej Bartkowiak, who shot Speed, The Verdict, and Terms of Endearment, and as a director has delivered a few fun actioners like Doom.

And now they have all collaborated as a supergroup on Trespass, with one of the dumbest screenplays ever deemed worthy of shooting.  It's a plain old home invasion thriller that aims to mine its suspense from the leverage chess game between the invaders and the hostages, kind of like The Desperate Hours.  But there are no stakes involved, no characters to care about, no reason to be invested in the family taken hostage or in the hostage takers, and no believable reason that the hostage situation should last more than ten minutes.

The movie's most believable moments come at the beginning, before the crisis begins.  Our first image is of Kyle Miller (Cage), a diamond dealer, fast-talking his way through a sale as he arrives at his palatial new home.  His wife Sarah (Kidman) is bickering with their daughter Avery (Liana Liberato) about the young girl going to a party.  The early family scenes are formulaic but genuine, thanks to three good actors.

Then four burglars show up and take the family hostage.  They all wear tattered ski masks.  One of them speaks more than the rest, and appears to be in charge.  In the mask he looks like Gary Oldman, but when he takes it off we realize he is in fact Ben Mendelsohn.  Another one represents the brawn of the group, and is very quick to resort to violence so that we know he's going to be the amoral one.  In the mask I could have sworn he was played by Will Patton, but it turns out he's Dash Mihok.  The third, good-looking and bland, is instantly recognizable as Cam Gigandet, who's been good-looking and bland for years in such films as Twilight and Priest.  The female burglar (Jordana Spiro) is a hot-tempered and reckless drug addict.

Naturally, the robbery doesn't go as planned, partially because Kyle has something up his sleeves, partially because all the burglars are inept enough to shame the Lavender Hill Mob.  They point their guns at Kyle's and Sarah's heads without firing so many times that I was wondering if the guns fired at all, or if they were poor lonely souls stuck in a Sartrean hell where they have guns but can never muster up the will to pull the trigger.  As the movie progresses they feel less like hostage takers and more like parents threatening their misbehaving children with a count to three, which is then delayed with endless fractions (two and a HALF... two and three QUARTERS...).

The acting is, well, pretty good.  It ought to be; Schumacher's no novice and his cast is top-notch.  Cage delivers at least two classic meltdowns that are sure to be tacked onto the famed "Nicolas Cage Loses His Shit" video.  Kidman tries with all her might to make her character believable, but the screenplay's insurmountable plot twists put her through the blender to the point where playing this part is impossible.  I enjoyed Mendelsohn too, in a rare villainous role, and he relishes a ridiculous scene in which he does a perfect impression of Cage on a call from the family's home security company.

A good thriller, even one with a twisty-turny plot, is not allowed to cheat.  This one does, particularly in a sub-plot involving the Gigandet character and his relationship with Sarah.  Did she have an affair with him?  Is he merely infatuated with her?  Differing flashbacks seem to suggest both.  In a movie with this many security cameras, it ought to have been easy to clear up.

We can also never quite be sure what the burglars' motive is.  Just what they're after is shifted so many times that I began to suspect I was watching a Pinter-like drama in which the characters represent archetypes and their present actions and motivations don't matter. (In fact, there was one of those: when Harold Pinter rewrote Sleuth in 2007.) The biggest twist that the movie provides is that the four criminals are not masterminds as we originally thought, but very, very stupid.  The Mendelsohn character appears to be the smart one, but we know that at one point he thought, "I have a big heist to pull off.  I'd better bring along a big thug who just wants to hurt people, my drug addict girlfriend, and a guy who's in love with the wife."

A good version of this movie has already been made.  It's called Panic Room, it was directed by David Fincher and starred Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart.  It has pretty much the same plot as this one.  The villains are the same type: the thoughtful leader (Forest Whitaker), the young hotspur (Jared Leto), and the violent thug (Dwight Yoakam).  But it was cleverly written and played fair by its own rules.  There's no real reason for Trespass's existence, other than that Joel Schumacher can now rightfully claim that Batman & Robin was not his worst movie.

* out of ****

Caginess factor: Moderate.  About Con Air level, but nowhere near Face/Off.  (Raise the factor to "High" when you realize that Cage delayed production for a day and insisted that he switch roles to play the villain.  Note that Liev Schreiber was approached to take over Cage's role.  This must have been Kidman's call, as he's married to her best friend Naomi Watts.  Further evidence of her going above and beyond to hold this godawful movie together.)