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| Image courtesy of RLJE |
We all know and love Nicolas Cage for his over-the-top acting method and what better character to justify his trademark erratic insanity than a crimson-crowned madman in a kitsch Las Vegas suit? You would think, but you would be wrong.
Sympathy for the Devil follows a man with at most a mundane existence on the night that his wife goes into labor. On his way to the delivery room, however, he is held up by a creepy stranger with a machine gun mouth. Psycho man forces the stressed husband at gunpoint to abandon his appointment and orders him to hit the highway for destination unknown.
This basic plot promises a night of unpredictable, perhaps even supernatural events, especially with Cage’s constant philosophical quotes and his Satanic name dropping while he wreaks havoc on his terrified hostage. Regrettably, this is not the case. The film is so bland that you cannot blame the audience for expecting a huge twist, but alas, what you see is what you get – right to the end.
Directed by Yuval Adler, known for 2019’s The Operative, Sympathy for the Devil has its fair share of action shoot-outs, explosions and obligatory corpses of innocent people with terrible luck. It has a measure of acceptable dialogue and the acting is down the middle, which makes for a good time-killer if you are out of options, but it is far from a decent action thriller that will keep you glued.
Sympathy for the Devil attempts to use Nicolas Cage’s reputation for highly entertaining lunacy to give it a bump, but it is nothing more than a poor man’s A History of Violence without the intensity and plot development of the latter.
Nicolas Cage’s hostage is played by Swedish actor Joel Kinnaman (2021’s The Suicide Squad and 2014’s RoboCop). Kinnaman does banality and confusion very well, which feeds the plot and successfully plants the necessary doubt in the mind of the viewer on many occasions. The two actors make a fine pair of opponents while the tension mounts, both instilling the required suspicion in one another, but the film is just a dragging, real-time kidnapping scenario. It lacks essential substance to provoke one’s interest in the reasons for Cage’s actions and soon you just wait for the next weird thing he does instead of investing genuine attention in the unfolding story.
Even when the rhyme and reason behind the entire film comes to light, you find yourself reacting with little more than a shrug. There is simply not enough to fill the pitcher here. It is a lackluster film that tells its story in one straight lane that never becomes more. The road that is Sympathy for the Devil does not lead to some grand highway of subplots and shocking revelations, but rather dwindles into some godforsaken parking lot of mundanity.
Sympathy for the Devil has its moments, but they are forgettable. Even fans of Nicolas Cage might want to watch this just to say they have seen it, but do not expect a rollercoaster ride of Tarantino’esque action or Del Toro level storytelling. Just strap in for a weird ride with whiskey dick promise.
—Tasha Danzig