In The Retirement Plan Nicolas Cage Plays John Wick as an Elderly Parrothead. So Why Does It Suck?
Why is the latest shitty Nicolas Cage direct-to-streaming stinker getting a theatrical release? Is it pity or some kind of tax dodge?
As someone who hosts a Nicolas Cage-themed podcast, has spent years writing a column that requires me to watch and write about all of Cage’s movies (and, to a lesser extent, John Travolta’s) and is working on a book about Cage’s life’s work I am unhealthily invested in the actor’s career.
I feel a surge of excitement and anticipation whenever something good happens for Cage, like the wonderful buzz for his trippy upcoming film Dream Scenario, which seems like the perfect companion piece to Adaptation.
There was a good long stretch where it felt like Cage was doomed to spend the rest of his career churning out interchangeable direct-to-streaming action movies. So I’m excited that Cage has re-entered the wonderful world of theatrically released motion pictures with a vengeance.
That does not, however, mean that Cage has stopped making bad movies or making a LOT of movies. Cage is still unhealthily prolific as well as weirdly undiscriminating.
The last time I ventured into a movie theater to watch a new Cage movie it was Renfield, which was a big studio studio movie with Cage as the Dracula that, unfortunately, sucked.
The same, unfortunately, is true of Cage’s latest vehicle as well, the muddled and misguided The Retirement Plan. I was only vaguely aware of the film’s existence and I am, as we have already established, someone who has made Nicolas Cage fandom a central component of my career.
I didn’t know The Retirement Plan as anything other than a title on Cage’s Wikipedia and IMDB pages with a suspiciously stacked cast.
I wish that were still the case! Oh but it was exquisite to live in willful ignorance! Verily, it was a paradise.
Even though I saw The Retirement Plan in a movie theater it felt eerily like I was watching a terrible direct-to-streaming Nicolas Cage action movie at home.
That’s partially because I was the only person in the theater last night. That’s a strange, sometimes sublime, sometimes creepy experience not terribly dissimilar from watching it from the comfort of my own bed.
But that’s also because The Retirement Plan is a bad direct-to-streaming schlock fest that somehow managed to score a pity theatrical release, possibly on the strength of a cast that includes, in addition to Cage, includes his old Season of the Witch pal Ron Perlman, Ernie Hudson, Lynn Whitfield, Joel David Moore, Ashley Greene, Jackie Earle Haley and former NBA player Rick Fox.
The final reason watching The Retirement Plan in the theater felt like watching a shitty direct-to-streaming Nicolas Cage movie is because it’s more or less an exact cross between two John Travolta direct-to-streaming movies from the mid-teens: Criminal Activities and I Am Wrath.
Cage was at one point supposed to star in I Am Wrath for William Friedkin. The timing didn’t work out, however, so both men left the project and were replaced by Travolta and The Mask/Eraser director Chuck Russell.
The godawful screenplay must have made a strong impression on Cage. He apparently was so amazed by it that he vowed that if he ever had another opportunity to play a seemingly milquetoast everyman who turns into the world’s greatest super-assassin when someone hurts his family he would not let anything get in the way of taking it.
Like I Am Wrath, this is the wildly implausible story of an old dude who seems like an ordinary guy until shit goes down and he turns into a more impressive version of James Bond.
Like Criminal Activities it’s a Tarantino/Elmore Leonard knockoff populated by colorful criminals and featuring a flashy performance by Jackie Earl Haley as a diminutive mobster who may only be knee-high to a grasshopper but makes up for what he lacks in height with violent psychosis.
The Retirement Plan introduces all of its forgettable characters in what it has deluded itself into thinking is iconic and badass fashion: every time a new underworld denizen enters the proceedings they get a free frame with their name and a whip sound.
The movie is pretty damn proud that it has something that most movies don’t: characters with names. And not just any names, mind you! I’m talking names like (looks at IMDB) Matt, Bobo, Sarah, Lou, Jimmy and Blade.
In most movies characters refer to each other by “Hey you” or, “You, person!” Not The Retirement Plan. Its characters have names and it is pretty damn proud of that fact.
Ashley Greene of the Twilight franchise stars as Ashley, the wife of Jimmy (Jordan Johnson-Hinds), a doomed man who has stolen an all-important hard drive that is one of the shittiest and most halfassed MacGuffins I’ve seen in a very long time.
A hard drive? A fucking hard drive? What is this, 1991? Have they just invented computers smaller than houses? Why on earth would a movie in 2023 revolve around a mad quest to control a stupid fucking hard drive?
Ashley gives the hard drive to her daughter Sarah (Thalia Campbell) and instructs her to go to the Cayman Islands and find Matt (Cage), a grandfather she was previously told was dead.
Cage plays a character who is older and grayer than the actor playing him. He’s got a style I would describe as Margaritaville casual. He looks like a Parrothead crossed with The Dude from The Big Lebowski but he has a secret. A deadly secret!
As we have already established repeatedly, Matt is the world’s greatest assassin. Like Travolta in I Am Wrath he was once a black ops operative the government would send in when they need people brutally murdered. Then he left his old life behind for one of peace until something happens that forces him to go back to the old him.
A powerful mobster in search of the hard drive dispatches henchmen to retrieve it that include Perlman’s Bobo. Perlman spends much of the film doing an intergenerational double act with Sarah that’s unexpectedly charming.
Perlman makes Bobo a brute with a heart of gold, a bruiser with the soul of a poet. He looks like Anthony Bourdain if he were also The Thing of Fantastic Four fame.
Cage also spends much of the film bonding with a granddaughter he never knew he had but Cage’s performance is limited by the stock nature of his character and the fact that he is never even remotely believable as a beach bum ninja with a Rambo skill set and body count numbering in the thousands.
Cage is so wildly implausible as a killing machine who DESTROYS adversaries young enough to be his grandson that the movie would be better off playing his unmatched killing skills for laughs.
Instead the script requires characters to constantly talk about how good Matt is at killing, and how he’s killed pretty much everybody, and the people he hasn’t killed yet he will definitely kill at some point.
We never actually see Nicolas Cage doing any the badass stuff. Cage is an old dude, after all, and clearly did not put any more thought or effort into the role than was absolutely necessary.
Cage turned down multiple movies so he learn how to butcher an animal for a single scene in Joe but judging from his performance here he doesn’t seem to have hit the gym even a single time to play a man whose hands and feet and mind are all lethal weapons.
As in I Am Wrath Cage’s geriatric mass murderer hooks up with an old pal who knows him from the old days, when Matt was all about murder. In this case the friend is played by Ernie Hudson, who is as under-served and poorly served by the screenplay and film as everyone else.
I did not care for The Retirement Plan. I really did not care for it and I am something of a Nicolas Cage fan.
Because I belong to Regal Unlimited I only had to pay a fifty four cent surcharge to see The Retirement Plan. I still did not get my money’s worth.
One and a Half Stars out of Five
I, unfortunately, saw it this weekend, as well, and had the exact same reaction. There weren't many reviews posted on Rotten Tomatoes, but Cage has been on a bit of a roll lately and I mistakenly thought "Well, if it's getting a theatrical release, how bad could it be?", so I took a chance.
So we should have told you to see The Nun2 after all?