Nicolas Cage starts the film relatively normal. Still a bit Nick Cagy. But normal enough to see him as just a guy. Toward the end of the movie he goes completely bananas. And I love it.
Today I saw a movie called "Matchstick Men" made with $62 million which grossed only $65 million, but in my opinion should have made more. I mean we have a director of Alien and Gladiator - Ridley Scott. The lead actor is the amazingly over the top - Nicolas Cage. And a wonderful script by Ted Griffin who wrote Ocean's Eleven. And like Oceans Eleven it's a comedy about con artists.
It is very strange to me that this is the first time I review anything by Nicolas Winding Refn here. I love this director and his style a lot. The movie Drive is perhaps the best introduction to him that you could ever get. It is his fastest paced movie ( apart from maybe Bronson ). He likes to be very slow. Drive is paced more or less like a normal film. That is why, if you want to start getting yourself into Nicolas Winging Refn I would recommend starting from Drive.
Visually the film is stunning. Though at times it tend to be a bit too stunning. This is because Nicolas Winding Refn doesn't see colors as vibrantly as the rest of us. So he tends to crank the saturation up to eleven. But apart from the saturated Neon aesthetic the movie captures a kind of foreigner's feeling. The type of feeling when you get into a different country and you see it for the first time. And you want to just walk around the streets at night. A lot of films focus on landmarks and tourist attraction sites. This rubs the films from the atmosphere of those places. This movie has this familiar feeling of walking around in a foreign city at night.
In a nutshell, the movie feels like a mash between Adrian Lyne's Flashdance, Damien Chazelle's Babylon, Ti West's MaXXXine and Lars Von Trier's Nymphomaniac, well stirred and served in a colorful presentation straight from Nicolas Winding Refn.
"Your honor..." - said the lawyer, standing in a court, which was being broadcast on a screen in the living-room of Mr. Hambleton's house - "...there is no denying that my client is guilty in the murders of all of those people that were mentioned in the case so far. The evidence provided by the police are undeniable. The jury would also agree that the fact that my client did commit all those murders are beyond reasonable doubt. And my client doesn't try to conceal this fact either. Right?" - the lawyer looked at the cage standing in the corner of the court room. There was sitting a man. He had chains all over him. Two policemen were guarding the cage itself. The man looked up, exchanged a stare of understanding with the lawyer and said - "I did commit those murders, sir."