Snake Eyes (1998)

With its aged boxer, femme fatale, and plain-clothes detective investigating a gritty crime, Snake Eyes was clearly intended as a 1940s hardboiled film noir taken to the next level with a mega budget, a new film-age garish colour palette, breathless action, and sweeping camera shots that take in every minute thing happening at an Atlantic City boxing match where an assassination takes place, but the razzle dazzle of producer Brian de Palma's camera tricks (sweeping overhead shots taking in the goings-on of multiple hotel rooms and the like) overwhelms the barest of plots - a macguffin propels the story which is resolved within the first hour, leaving it up to the tricksiness, not the plot, to entertain you.

★★☆☆☆

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The Wicker Man (2006)

This dreadful remake of the original mystery thriller of 1973 - a sinister movie about a policeman investigating a child's disappearance from a creepy, cultish remote island community - updates the story by wheeling out a big, hollow wooden figure at the start the movie, too: Nicolas Cage in Edward Woodward's police officer role.

☆☆☆☆☆

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Con Air (1997)

Psychopathic prisoners take over the plane transporting them I forget where - it doesn't matter - and it is up to John Cusack on the ground and Nicolas Cage and his spectacular mullet in the air to thwart the criminals' plans to do I forget what - something diabolical, it doesn't matter - in this shamelessly unsubtle 90s action that just goes on and on and on with lots of slo mo swagger, fiery explosions, and a squealing electric guitar insisting how super exciting it all is.

★★☆☆☆

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Knowing (2009)

People were scathing about this 2009 scifi that stars Nicolas Cage as a father who believes the world is ending but with good extended disaster effects and the not-quite-Hollywood direction taken by the plot, it maintains interest even if Cage and the sound department's performances are one-histrionic-note throughout - everything that happens, whether a train accident that kills thousands or a child's cry at night, elicits orchestral doom and Cage melodrama.

★★★☆☆

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