In recent years Mr. Cage’s lack of discrimination (or taste) has threatened to overshadow the sweep of his career, which is understandable if you’ve seen him in the laughable remake of “The Wicker Man” (2006), about a cop battling honey-growing female pagans, including while wearing a bear costume. Yet after “Bad Lieutenant” I have begun to wonder if the narrative that many of us have grafted onto his career — the early if erratic promise, the mature successes, the dire midlife choices — does him an injustice. The truth is that he gets the job done in entertainments like “National Treasure” and “Knowing”(2009), which assumedly give him the financial freedom to cut loose with a director like Mr. Herzog. And the highlights from “The Wicker Man” (available on YouTube) do have their demented pleasures.
Mr. Clooney, again by point of unfair comparison, has rarely if ever delivered a performance as profoundly out of sync with the presumptive goals of a movie as Mr. Cage’s turn in “The Wicker Man.” But neither does Mr. Clooney send shivers up your spine, either in delight or dismay. Mr. Cage is the more unpredictable actor and consequently the more dangerous one. He has made a habit of failure and frequently pimped out his talent. And yet, as “Bad Lieutenant” shows, he remains the same Nicolas Cage of his early, later and most critically lauded career: the man of a thousand facial tics, a student of all accents and a master of none, a star who, for better, worse and sometimes both, gives us reason after reason to go the movies.
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