Apologies, but if you’ve come for a list of uncontroversially “good” movies, you’ve strayed down a dangerous path and should turn back now, while you still can. We’ve crossed the event horizon and entered a place where terms like “good” or “bad” or “movies” have no meaning, a place where only one actor resides: the inimitableNicolas Cage. There’s nothing and no one like Cage; he’s an unexplainable force, a chaos agent, a mad genius with no regard for an audience’s idea of normal. As alreadyproven byCommunity, trying to put Cage’s abilities as an actor into simple terms is a foolhardy exercise, like trying to measure the weight of a smoke ring. Instead, we crunched the numbers, compiled the data, and watchedGhost Riderlike 16 times to create an official Cage Scale™, which measures five crucial components of a classic Nicolas Cage performance.
- Is it a “bad” film elevated to endlessly watchable through the sheer force of whatever the hell Nicolas Cage doing?
Is Nicolas Cage making performance choices that no other actor, living or dead, would have ever made, whether they work or not?
Is Nicolas Cage wearing a wig of some sort, and/or a facial hair prosthetic?
Is Nicolas Cage committing 10,000% to an accent that he has mastered by about 30%?
Are the actors around Nicolas Cage evencloseto being on the same wavelength?
Using this highly scientific and completely foolproof process, we whittled a list down to 13 essential Nicolas Cage films, which is harder than it sounds. There are some instances in which Nicolas Cage is putting in top-tier freakouts but the overall movie still manages to be boring, likeGhost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. There are movies where Nicolas Cage is kind’ve doing a weird thing, but it’s not really the “focal point”, per se, of the piece, likeMoonstruckor theinfamouslyKathleen Turner-enragingPeggy Sue Got Married. There are also theNational Treasuremovies, which are flawless works of popcorn fun but Nicolas Cage is playing it pretty straight the entire time.
So maybe these aren’t the “best” Nicolas Cage movies. But they are themostNicolas Cage movies, for better, worse, or whatever.
Before We Begin
The above video contains Nicolas Cage’s one-minute cameo in the 1988 filmNever on Tuesday. It is one of the most singularly unhinged performances since humanity first willed pictures into movement. I could travel the Earth for millennia studying every dialect since the dawn of time and still not know the words to describe it. So just watch. I leave it un-ranked out of fear that trying to define its quality in objective terms would start the singularity that consumes us all.
Especially not on Tuesday.
13. Primal
CAGE SCALE: 3/10 Cages
2019’sPrimalbegins with Nicolas Cage getting absolutely launched out of a tree by a rare white jaguar in the middle of the Brazilian rainforest, an image that should precede all great stories, up to and including the Judeo-Christian Bible. Cage plays Frank Walsh, an aggressively sweaty dickhead big game hunter trying to ship that big cat—referred to as a “WHITE JAG” several times throughout, bless—in an ocean hauler that’s also playing host to a notorious criminal, Richard Loffler (Kevin Durand). Loffler, of course, escapes, followed by the WHITE JAG, pitting cage and his increasingly soiled clothing against two killing machines.Primalis an astoundingly mediocre film, but it’s also the prime example of a Latter-Day Cage performance, which occupies the lonely space where phoning it in and giving 10,000% meet. It’s like watching a 90-year-old war veteran insist he can drop in on a halfpipe. There’s beauty in that.
12. Con Air
CAGE SCALE: 4/10 CAGES
The late-90s hat trick ofThe Rock,Con Air, andFace/Offis the most powerful achievement ever pulled off by a person who isn’t literally a wizard. That middle child,Con Air, is probably the weakest of the bunch, which sounds like an insult until you remember it’s also the only film in which Nicolas Cage delivers a devastating roundhouse kick while rocking a pair of bootcut jeans. Cage plays Cameron Poe, an Army Ranger imprisoned for violently defending his wife (Monica Potter), who finds himself aboard an airplane hijacked by a crew of psychopaths led by Cyrus the Virus (John Malkovich). Everyone remembers Con Air as being insane because, uh, it absolutely is, but upon rewatch you realize Cage is shockingly subdued compared to the batshittery around him. Yes, he’s occasionally doing a Southern accent that needs ten-times more seasoning, and yes he does murder a man to defend a stuffy bunny rabbit. But the actual potency of the performance comes from two physical attributes. 1) The hair extensions bolted to Cage’s head, which was constructed using an elk’s hide, twine stolen from a witch’s cabin, and the dreams of orphan children. (Citation needed.) 2) Nicolas Cage is massive in this film. Just ludicrously thick. My dude played a scientist who occasionally jogged inThe Rockthen showed up a few months looking like a mad architect re-built the Colossus of Rhodes in a roadside trailer park.
Only real ones will admit that the moment Poe re-unites with his wife and the daughter he never met is a genuinely moving piece of filmmaking, bolstered by a heartrending reaction from Cage himself. WhenLeAnn Rimes' “How Do I Live” kicks in for asecondtime? Buddy, I’m weeping.
11. Outcast
CAGE SCALE: 4.5/10 CAGES
Outcastis a breathtakingly terrible film in which Nicolas Cage appears for roughly 17 minutes, but the force of those 17 minutes could sustain the power grids of at least 3 major cities for a month. Wearing a wig plucked from a KISS puppet found in a haunted antiquities store, Cage plays Gallain, one-eyed mentor to British knight Jacob (Hayden Christensen) during the Crusades. There’s a very specific Cage trademark at play here, where he commits to an accent he doesn’t quite have a handle on, but does it so confidently that it makes you question the nature of your own reality. You finishOutcast, having just seen Nicolas Cage scream with an accent I’d call “British by way of the adults in aPeanutscartoon”, and genuinely have to spend time remembering that’s not what anyone has ever sounded like. It’s quintessential Cage in that when he’s on screen your eyes are straightgluedto a movie you’d otherwise toss in the trash without a second thought. Truly astounding.
10. Raising Arizona
CAGE SCALE: 5/10 CAGES
Raising Arizonais almost assuredly the “best” movie on this list, but what makes it truly fascinating in terms of Cage’s entire career is that it might be the only film he’s appeared in that’s operating on the same, not-of-this-Earth wavelength. TheCoen Brotherscreated a world where Nicolas Cage’s energy felt like it naturallybelonged, which is like successfully teaching Bigfoot to a law degree. Cage andHolly Hunterplay Hi and Ed McDunnough, a convict and a correctional officer who fall in love and look to fix their infertility problem by kidnapping one of a rich furniture magnate’s five quintuplets. Sheer lunacy from frame one,Raising Arizonaplays like a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon where Cage (and his simply transcendent mustache) is its bumbling Daffy Duck. He plays Hi like a lobotomized scarecrow whose only function is to love his wife, both achingly sweet and doomed to dangerous naivety. It’s that rare Cage performance where the magnetism doesn’t come from oddball choices, because the oddball choice look like normalcy in a movie where zany is sane.
9. Color Out of Space
CAGE SCALE: 5.5/10 CAGES
Color out of Space, theRichard Stanley-directed adaptation of anH.P. Lovecrafttale, is about an unexplainable cosmic entity that crash-lands to Earth without explanation, delivering naught but technicolor madness and indescribable lunacy to all it touches, so yes I choose to read it as an allegory for Nicolas Cage’s career. Appropriately, Cage delivers an all-time bit of late-era Cage batshittery as Nathan Garder, whose family is, uh, let’s say “affected” by the glowing space orb while staying at Nathan’s late father’s alpaca farm. (“The animal of the future!") The hook ofColor out of Spaceis that Richard Stanely is a certified mad-man with impeccable taste in hats making a movie that’s only interested in chewing gum, crafting sickening body horror, and making Nicolas Cage lose his entire goddamn mind, and buddy, the scary space rock took all the gum. Where the movie is light on plot, it’s heavy on Nicolas Cage screaming directly into the camera, often about alpacas, occasionally about having to kill his grotesquely mutated wife and child, and like 30% to 40% of the time slipping into his accent fromVampire’s Kiss.Color out of Spaceis anexperience, an endurance test to see how much unfiltered Cage one person can stomach at a time / to see what’d be like to take an eighth of shrooms and watchLeaving Las Vegas. The mouth of madness is open, and it’s yelling about alpaca milk.
8. The Rock
CAGE SCALE: 6/10 CAGES
The combination of Nicolas Cage andMichael Bayis such a dangerous mixture I’m relatively sure it’s classified in the United States as a domestic terrorist threat. Thankfully, for the safety of the nation, Cage and Bay only collaborated once, and the result was the inarguably perfect action fuck-a-paloozaThe Rock. Like all of Bay’s films,The Rockis a tornado of fireballs, machismo, and the essence inside a pair of wraparound sunglasses that says “fuck you in particular” to any whiff of realism. In short: It rips. Cage is in the lead as FBI bio-weapons expert named—and I really must insist you brace yourself if you’re not familiar with the two words that come next—Stanley Goodspeed(!!!), who teams up with disgraced SAS Captain John Patrick Mason (Sean Connery) to stop a crew of terrorists from launching chemical weapons off of Alcatraz Island.
The importance ofThe Rockin Nicolas Cage’s path to becoming Hollywood’s strangest enigma cannot be overstated. The performance itself is fun as hell, but The Rock also turned Cage into history’s most unlikely action star. Dude landed the role ofStanley Goodspeed(!!!) afterArnold freaking Schwarzeneggerturned it down, and the producers were like “the guy fromMoonstruckis basically the same thing.” WithoutThe Rock, there’s no “put the bunny back in the box,” noFace/Offfreakouts, noNational Treasurefranchise.
7. Between Worlds
CAGE SCALE: 6.5/10 CAGES
Between Worldsis one of those movies where you absolutely know what it smells like, and that smell is someone knocking over a plastic whiskey bottle while having sex in a tent. I’m so mad I have to explain this further.Maria Pulera’s supernatural thriller is David Lynch Lite, which doesn’t mean it isn’t effectively weird as hell. Taking part in roughly one dozen of the gruntiest sex scenes you’ll ever see in your life, Cage plays a truck driver named Joe, who finds himself in a battle of wits when the spirit of his dead ex-wife Mary (Lydia Hearst) possesses the daughter (Penelope Mitchell) of his new, psychically-gifted girlfriend, Julie (Franka Potente). A lot happening here, between the worlds! But the one, single thing you need to knowfor sureis thatBetween Worldscontains a scene in which Nicolas Cage’s character has sex while reading a memoir titled “Memories” written by the actor, Nicolas Cage. I have not known a single night’s rest since watching Between Worlds and feel zero qualms about transferring this burden to you, reader.
Post note:I once asked Cageabout the “Memories” scene and he said, quote, “I thought it was extremely funny.” Can’t argue with the king.
6. Mom and Dad
CAGE SCALE: 7/10 CAGES
For three years now, I’ve been recommending the criminally underratedMom and Dadto every single person I meet, including at the tail end of several job interviews. I didn’t getanyof those, but I do get to live in the knowledge that directorBrian Taylor’s nasty little horror-comedy is a bloody gem and one of Nicolas Cage’s wildest films of the decade. An unexplainable case of mass hysteria causes parents across the world to violently turn on their own children, forcing high-schooler Carly Ryan (Anne Winters) and her younger brother Josh (Zackary Arthur) to fend off mom (Selma Blair)and dad (Cage). Once the affliction takes hold, there isn’t a single spastic movement or facial contortion known to mankind that is off-limits for Cage. Normal human speech patterns are a mockery to him, a cheeky dare meant to be overcome. In addition toGhost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance—a movie I couldn’t even recommend on this list, let that sink in—Taylor also directedCrank: High Voltage, and I’m relatively sure his only note to Nicolas Cage on Mom and Dad was “embody the phraseCrank: High Voltage.”
Buried beneath the bloodshed and a tower made entirely of empty Monster energy drink cans,Mom and Dadhas a poignant core message about how fast one’s life can change; one day you’re doing donuts in the high school parking lot, one blink of the eye later you’re commuting two hours every morning to feed a family of four. It’s a humbling thought, but that’s life, ya know? If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, it’ll crank (high voltage) right by. But alsoMom and Dadfeatures Cage absolutely bodying a pool table with a sledgehammer in a fit of mid-life crisis rage. Whomst among us?
CAGE SCALE: 8/10 CAGES
I don’t envy movie marketing departments, because sometimes it’s near impossible to sum up the appeal of a film in a quick, snappy way.Othertimes, though, you can just say Nicolas Cage rips enough cocaine to kill a bull elephant and gets into an ax battle with a demon biker gang and like, boom, sold. When I heard the pitch forMandyI didn’t just buy a movie ticket, I entered a fugue state that only ended when I was sitting in a theater to watchMandy, baffling medical professionals across the globe. But the thing about Panos Cosmatos' heavy metal horrorshow that catches you off guard is just how quiet that first hour is, way more dream that nightmare.Mandyworks to establish the beautifully sleepy home life of the logger Red (Cage) and his artist girlfriend, Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough), which only makes the intrusion of the monstrously supernatural hit that much harder.
The blood-covered ax battles get all the press—and like, I get it—but the centerpiece of the movie is Cage’s alcohol-fueled bathroom freakout after Mandy’s murder. It gets a lot of credit as Classic Crazy Cage—and, again, Ireallyget that—but it’s honestly some of his finest dramatic work in years, so raw that it rounds back to being achingly real. Have you ever seenactualgrief? It’s not pretty. It looks a lot like a pantsless Nicolas Cage sitting on a toilet, screaming until he quite literally can’t anymore.
