Rating: 11/20
Plot: After an attempt to steal ten million dollars from a bank vault goes wrong, an anti-heroic thief is sent to jail. Eight years later, he tries to reunite with his daughter by buying her an ugly blue teddy bear. When that daughter is kidnapped by the thief's old partner, he's given twelve hours to get the money. Meanwhile, the FBI is watching his every move.
This is not the best or original of movies by a long shot, but it's kind of a fun ride if you're willing to shut the old noggin off completely and just roll with it. I wouldn't have watched it without the presence of Nic Cage, and although this is one of his straight roles where he runs around as a semi-awkward action hero, he's still got a couple of Nicolas Cage moments. One is where he threatens somebody in that way that only he can--"You touch her and I'll take you down to the levy and kick your fucking ass." See, that line is just going to sound stupid coming out of anybody else's mouth. There's one of those patented twitchy demonstrative finger-points as he's talking to his daughter on the phone, even better since he's saying "happy face pancakes" as he does it. And there's a neat scene where he goes a little overboard when telling somebody that he didn't listen to Creedence Clearwater Revival. This movie can be divided into three chunks, each one more preposterous than the other. In the first, you get a glimpse at the thief at work, and although it's fairly well done, it's nothing we haven't seen before. Then, you have a big middle chunk where Cage is searching New Orleans (during Mardis Gras, seemingly only in that setting so that we can see some colorful floats or so the bad guy can seem like even more of a bad guy by making a nasty Hurricane Katrina reference) for his daughter, showing us his inner-Neeson. And then, Cage is off on another heist, this one which seems improbable even for a movie like this given the amount of time he's given to accomplish it. But the fight scene between Cage and Josh Lucas--one of the many actors in this who ham it up enough to convince some people that this is a comedy--tops it all. There are characters on fire, near-drownings, stabbings, and gunfire with two men who suddenly become superhuman. Lucas and Cage aren't the only characters who overact a bit. Danny Huston does his best Popeye Doyle and has a great rambling monologue. Seriously, look at this sucker: "You're a thief, a crook, and a scumbag, but you're also a very clever tree frog. So you concoct this Kinsey-is-alive-and-has-snatched-my-kid fantasy so that A) you can show you don't have the money, otherwise, why wouldn't you pay the ransom, or B, send us running all over town searching for your daughter and her abductor to afford you the time to dig up the dough and jump onto a cigarette boat and zip down to the Bahamas where you can sip rum for the rest of your days and listen to classic rock played by bands with muscular guitars and dead drummers." Even Nicolas Cage seems exasperated as he's listening to that! Perhaps best of all is an Aussie passenger Lucas picks up who couldn't stop talking about his penis. Score redundancy brings this down more than you'd think something like that can bring something like this down, but there is a terrific Wilhelm Scream if you're into that sort of thing.
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