‘Sympathy for the Devil’ Movie Review: A Road Thriller Elevated By Cage’s Wackadoodle Turn
Photo from RLJE Films
From Jeremy Kibler
Nicolas Cage is credited as “The Passenger” in Sympathy for the Devil, but he is steering this two-hander road pic with flaming red hair, a Boston accent, and his trademark wild-card attitude. Being about two men in a car, one can’t help but think of both 1986’s queer-coded The Hitcher and Michael Mann’s Collateral. Director Yuval Adler’s film is a bit more rudderless on a plot level, but boy does Cage give a truly wackadoodle performance — he is in peak form here.
Joel Kinnaman plays David, a Nevada man dropping off his son to go meet his wife at the hospital, where she’s about to give birth to their second child. He’s already running late, passing the Las Vegas Strip, and then once he gets into the parking garage, a strange man in a red suit jacket matching his hair gets into David’s car. Pointing a gun at David, the man forces him to just drive to Boulder City Hospital. Along the way, David tries outsmarting this crazed lunatic to escape, but this passenger hates being interrupted by David’s “pleas for sympathy” (and his wife calling, wondering where he is). He also loves the nightlife and has got to boogie, so how is this night going to go?
Cage is fully committed and secretes danger like a nocturnal animal, delivering an abundance of moments that could register as camp to certain audiences. When one of David’s escape attempts results in the passenger’s broken nose, Cage goes off, “I wanted to be 100-percent sex tonight, and you cut that in half. I’m now 50-percent sex,” and does a Little Ceasar gangster impression. Back in the car, Cage tells a story about the cause of his stuffy nose as a young boy, thanks to “the Mucus Man” with a briefcase full of boogers; it’s the weirdest bedtime story that only Cage could sell. Best of all, however, is the film’s centerpiece in a roadside diner where tuna melts are ordered (the passenger does NOT like mozzarella). It instantly recalls Jack Nicholson’s masterfully delivered no-substitutions scene from Five Easy Pieces and Quentin Tarantino’s darkly funny, let-me-tell-you-a-story dialogue, along with an incongruous jukebox song.
Cage is always going to Cage, but Joel Kinnaman manages to hold his own as an equally mysterious foil, getting us to question if David/The Driver is the innocent family man he seems to be. Director Yuval Adler gets a surprising amount of tension out of this one-night-only pairing, aided by a cool, menacing industrial score by Ishai Adar, and seems to stay out of Cage’s way. When first-timer Luke Paradise’s script has to walk itself into a corner for a resolution, it’s far more tepid than the ride getting there. But in the grand scheme of things, you never know when you’re going to get a perfunctory Cage performance or an unforgettably batshit-crazy one, and Sympathy for the Devil has an ace up its sleeve.
Sympathy for the Devil hits select theaters on July 28, 2023.
Rating: 3/5
