Bullet Points: Outcast
There is a fine line between a good movie and a good Nic Cage movie. No Country for Old Men is a really good movie. Drive Angry is a really good Nic Cage movie. See the difference there? One is judged on the script, acting, directing, and all that other stuff that goes into making a film. The other is judged mostly on the ridiculousness of Cage’s hair piece and whether or not he pretends to have an accent or talk like Elvis. Outcast is neither, unfortunately. It fails to live up to the “so bad it’s good” that we expected from it and falls into the category of “is it almost over cause I’m hungry” area. Hayden Christensen should be in his prime and making good movies by now. It’s amazing that George Lucas basically discovered Harrison Ford and Hayden Christensen. How the mighty have fallen.
The Gist: A mysterious warrior teams up with the children of the murdered Chinese Emperor against their eldest brother who has become mad and wishes to kill them and rule the land.
The Cast: If I told you there was a movie where Anakin from the Star Wars prequels teams up with Nicolas Cage to fight in the Crusades before heading to “THE FAR EAST” to wander around drunk and drugged out before going against the new Emperor of China I’m sure you’d be like, “I gotta see that shit!” Well, such a movie does exist but it is not something that I would recommend sober. The opening scenes show the two honkey’s fighting in the Crusades, I assume, but after the opening 4 minutes Cage’s character disappears for the next hour. He finally returns with a few great lines (“I am the WHITE GHOST!”) but his absence means that we’re supposed to cheer for Hayden Christensen and that is not a good thing. That man cannot act worth a shit. I have always thought that George Lucas got a worse rap than he should have for the prequels when it came to the script and whatnot cause you could put Hayden in a Tarrantino movie and it would still sound like dogshit. Let’s not even discuss his Russian DJ hair style. Good Lord, I just want to punch him square in the jaw.
One of the most punchable faces in Hollywood.
The Villain: I feel bad for Andy On as he keeps doing shitty movies. It doesn’t mean much when you are the best part about a terrible movie. Skip this and Special ID and watch True Legend or Three Kingdoms instead. His character is about as worthless as a second bellybutton. He kills his father in the throne room that everyone saw him in and then comes out and says that his 14 year old brother did it. HE WASN’T EVEN THERE! And then to make it even worse, he has every soldier at his disposal and still can’t capture his siblings even though he knows where they’re going.
You know you have a poorly fleshed out villain when I couldn’t even find a decent image of him on Google.
The Action: The fight scenes weren’t horrible but it felt like the cameras were zoomed in too close and they used that shakey crap to try and give it a gritty look but all it did was give me a headache. I would assume that Hayden Christensen can swing a sword pretty well after doing a thousand lightsaber fights in the prequels but although he gets several fight scenes I never felt like he was that impressive with a blade. His character doesn’t get a name for most of the film and it doesn’t really matter since he does little more than stumble around either drunk or drugged up and then fire arrows accurately at obscene distances. I guess doing opium helps your aim. Something else I learned while watching this was that it takes a dozen stabs or slices to kill a white man while only one is needed to kill the Asians. Seriously, Cage is stabbed more times than Julius Caesar and Hayden doesn’t even wear armor by the end, cause I guess he knew he could take 7 or 8 more wounds before it really affected him. Andy On has incredible martial arts skill so a smart director would let him dish out some kung fu on some fools but instead we got a couple of kicks that just looked stupid.
This is what you wanted, isn’t it?
Take it Home:
- Favorite Quote: Imagine this from the mouth of Nic Cage: “The Black Guard is as thick as flies on a farting goat’s ass because of you.”
- Forget History: At least I think the makers of this film did. This is about as accurate a film in terms of weapons, armor, and just about anything else as Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was as a biography on the President.
- Missing something: One thing that I thought was strange or something they left out that could have added something to the characters was that they had already fought and killed for religion. Maybe they lost their piety and now they wanted to fight for something else. Anything is better than Christensen just wanting his sword back and then agreeing to help them cause “he was already going that way.”
- That’s a good look: I love when movies show the main character when they were like 8 but they still had the exact same haircut.
- Off into the sunset: Hayden is off to have his hair re-styled.
Rating: 2/5
