Sympathy for the Devil review

[Westside Steve]

Sympathy for the Devil

RLJE Films

R.          90 min

For my last film of the month, I was torn. BARBIE has gotten all sorts of headlines and it occurred to me maybe too many. I haven't read any reviews but I've skimmed a few articles not from film ragss but from political ones, one of which pointed out that Barbie says the word “patriarchy” at least 10 times during the film. Anyway, I made the decision not to hear a political sermon; I just wanted to see a movie. See it you if you want to. The next two were an actual coin to us between the new woke TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES or SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL, an action/thriller/kidnap flick starring Nicholas Cage and Joel Kinnaman as The Passenger and The Driver according to IMDb.  Often this kind of film can be a lot of fun and pretty darn exciting, well, but not always.

That means I was hoping for a little bit more; a little more clever dialogue, a little more action, a few more twists and turns and a lot more edge of your seat excitement. Well, you knew the old adage, “hope in one hand…”  It’s not that this was the worst movie I've ever seen but certainly a better script or maybe just a tweak or two could have made it a whole lot better. The passenger forces his way into the driver's car as the driver is entering the hospital parking lot hoping to be by the side of his pregnant wife, and forces him to drive to a vague destination for an even more vague reason. I could tell there was a backstory but the dialogue was so frenetic and disjointed I couldn't tell which part of it was just craziness and which might have happened. You sort of figure it out by the end but it's not the jaw-dropping revelation you've been hoping for, and could have easily been written into the story. Maybe the problem is that director Yuval Adler's second language is English, maybe he didn't have this stature to control Nick Cage who is absolutely able to go over the top but sometimes needs to be focused. At any rate among all the clichés of this genre of film the audience needs to be able to pick up clues and try to figure out if the guy is just a lunatic or actually has a legitimate ax to grind. Like I said, there are plenty of standard issue plot devices that keep the movie rolling along but nothing new and intriguing to keep you hooked. Too bad. It doesn't really suck but I got the distinct impression that everybody was trying to get this one in the can and go home early.

C

WSS