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by Willie Waffle
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The
Wicker Man
Whenever someone tells you a
movie was a cult hit in the 70’s, you should be very wary of
its entertainment
potential. You have
to remember lots of
people did lots of drugs in the 70’s, which made James
Taylor, disco and the
original The
Wicker Man seem much cooler than they are.
Based on the 70’s cult
hit
(I warned you), Nicolas Cage stars as California
sheriff Edward Malus. After
witnessing a
horrific accident and failing to save the victims, he has fallen into a
great
depression. One
day, he receives a
letter from his old fiancée, Willow
(Kate Beahan), begging for help in finding her lost daughter. Compelled by current
circumstances and his
desire to help a woman who meant so much to him in the past, he travels
to her
remote island community in the Puget
Sound,
and starts an investigation that leads to great peril.
Was Willow’s
daughter kidnapped? Why?
What has become of her?
When he was reading the
script, and saw the part of the movie where he is supposed to run
through the forest
in a bear suit, I hope Cage asked for a huge pay raise.
If he didn’t, I have lost all respect for
him
because this movie is a silly piece of junk you should only participate
in for
a huge sum of money that makes up for the assault on your integrity (I
can
handle movie fans all across the world laughing at me if it helps buy a
Bulgarian castle like the one Cage just purchased).
Writer/director Neil Labute
does include some frightful moments, but they are cheap frights that
have
nothing to do with advancing the story or helping understand the
characters
better. Then, he
takes us through an
unacceptably meaningless plot that can be predicted within the first 15
– 20
minutes even if you never knew the movie was a remake.
The dialogue is supposed to be mysterious and
get us more intrigued, but just ends up mocking the horridness of the
movie on
the big screen before you.
Meanwhile,
Edward
is sent running all around the island in a series of uneventful scenes
that
fail to build any tension partly because they are ill-conceived (based
on the
original script by Anthony Shaffer) and partly because Labute makes the
action
move at the speed of a glacier. However,
if you fall asleep, Cage will wake you up with his ranting and raving.
While the rest of the
characters are all moving through the movie in a haze (you’ll
understand why
when you learn about the story or, God forbid, see this movie), Cage
gets ample
opportunities to ham it up as Edward gets pushed further and further
over the
edge. Most of the
performance feels
forced, which is a shame from someone as talented as Cage, but I think
he was
trying to compensate for the disaster going on all around him.
The
Wicker Man commits the
worst sin a serious thriller, action film or horror movie can
– it is outright
silly and laughable.
0 Waffles (Out Of 4)
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2006 - WaffleMovies.com
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