#50 Stolen
Year: 2012
Director: Simon West
MPAA Rating: R
Epic Co-stars: None.
Running Time: 93 minutesCage Time: 90%
Cage Kills: 0
Cage Flip-outs: 2
James' Review: Let's just think for a moment about the one film in the last decade that you wished Nic Cage would have been in but wasn't. Easy answer: Taken. Sure Liam Neeson is a total badass, but we all know Nicolas Cage would have an even more particular set of skills and would have found him and killed him just a bit sooner and more fantastically. This is exactly what I was hoping this movie was, what it should be, but (very) unfortunately is not.
Cage is Will Montgomery, a master safe picker. He is a career criminal in a gang of three that specializes in high value, high tech, and high profile bank robberies. Montgomery needs to pull off one last heist to to build his nest egg to the point where he can retire and finally be the father that his seven year old daughter deserves. What could go wrong? Well actually, plenty of stuff and (spoiler alert) it does. The aftermath involves Cage going to jail for just under a dime, the cute girl getting off scott free, and the ugly crazy guy (Josh Lucas) spiraling down and eventually getting killed in a fire. Or did he.... (spoiler alert) No, actually he didn't. He faked his death and is totally pissed at Cage. He wants his cut of the money from the heist and will take Cage's daughter and eventually kill her if he doesn't get it. She is STOLEN!!!
Nic Cage has only one option: reunite with the Hot Chick and rob another bank to get enough ransom money. The rest of the movie from here is the creepy ugly guy driving around talking on his cellphone, Cage's daughter spending a lot of time in a trunk, and Nic Cage being much less badass than Liam Neeson was until the end of course.
Best. Most Mediocre. Movie. Ever.
Plot Holes:
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| Stolen was directed Simon West, who also directed Con Air. Do you see the resemblance? |
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| Nic Cage plays a homeless man that sleeps on the street. The sidewalk is his pillow... |
Movie quotability:
- "Oh my god. You shot me."
- "I left the money. I have to get the money."
- "I'm not the squirrel playing with his nuts here."
- "I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you."
- "Who dat?"
Plot Holes:
- Nicolas Cage is way too tech savvy to have been in lockup for 8 years.
- Nicolas Cage walks away from a ridiculous car wreck that kills 2 FBI agents and runs away.
- Nicolas Cage is only knee deep in water, yet we see the taxi sink hundreds of feet.
CAGEamatic
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Cinamatic
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|---|---|---|
| Skyler |
Acceptable
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Poor
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| Shauna |  | |
| James |
3.09/5.00
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1.59/5.00
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| Martine |
!Pissed that 90 minutes of her life was STOLEN in the CAGE!
| |
I don't know what you all are whining about, it wasn't too bad. Ok, maybe it helped that I was high on Norco while watching it and my sense of the passage of time was all out of whack, but it seemed fairly decent to me even if it was a bit slow at times in the middle and was pieced together from the plot lines of other movies.
ReplyDeleteMy favorite quote was the cab dispatcher that said "Did you just turn white on me?! Who dat?"
Unfortunately this movie has a huge plot hole that completely breaks the plot of the movie. The movie only exists because everyone thinks that Cage still has the $10M and he managed to hide it somewhere. The problem is that he got rid of the cash by dumping it into a fire which supposedly completely burned it all. But that would never happen, it would be like tossing a stack of phone books onto a fire and expecting them to burn up in two minutes. Even if the FBI had forgotten to check the burn barrel for the cash, it wouldn't have been long before the bums would have been spending scorched cash and raising all sorts of attention.
Even if we can ignore that glaring error, the gold heist is equally unrealistic. At the end we hear them value the 10lbs of gold at around $300k, or about $1875 an ounce which is fairly realistic in recent gold price history. The problem is that even at this high value $10M in gold would be 333lbs, not something you put in a gym bag and pass off to the bad guy using one arm. And earlier in the movie Cage said the bars weighed 27 lbs each, so he only needed 13 to make his $10M, but instead he melted down move of a pallet and what looked a lot more like than a dozen bars.
So there you have it, pop some Norco, sit back, and enjoy the Cage.
I'm thinking the "Norco" was typing when you wrote the second to the last sentence. Even a certified drug addict couldn't decode that gibberish...
ReplyDeleteBecause you didn't take your Norco before reading!
ReplyDeleteIt's true it isn't Taken but with Nicolas Cage. It's more akin to Gone in 60 Seconds, but with his daughter on the line instead of his brother, and with noone instead of Angelina Jolie.
ReplyDeleteGood point with "noone instead of Angelina Jolie". A hot chick could have done a lot for this movie. Actually, I think it's a requirement that they totally missed.
ReplyDeleteReview #10
ReplyDeleteWell, all I can say is, only Nicolas Cage would save his daughter from dying in a burning car by pushing it to an lake.
Great logic right there. Just mind the crazy guy jumping at your direction.
But seriously, this was an average Heist movie, with nothing new or really exciting. Cage factor not that high, and movie quality just the same.
Generic till the end, unfortunately.
My grade: 5.0.
#37 Stolen (2012) My DVD First Time View. I enjoyed it alot.
ReplyDelete