Far gone are the days when he played in gritty drama’s like Leaving Las Vegas, and box office smash-hits such as Con Air, or even National Treasure.
In his latest action movie, Stolen, he plays the notorious bank thief and family man Will Montgomery, who steals $10-m with his partners, Vincent, Riley Jeffers and Hoyt.
However, as we have seen countless times in such movies, without an ounce or originality, it turns out to be a botched heist. Will is captured by the FBI, but not before burning the money to avoid being handed a greater sentence.
Eight years later, Will is trying to mend his life, including his relationship with his estranged daughter, Alison Loeb (yes, of course, she has issues against him).
Lo and behold, as predicable as ever, Will’s former crime partner, Vincent, appears on the scene, wanting his cut of the stolen money, not believing the cash was burned.
He captures Will’s daughter in order to force him to hand over the loot.
And, of course, no action movie is complete with some kind of deadline to supposedly get the viewer on the edge of the seat, so Will only has has twelve hours to find a way to rescue his daughter from the hands of the psychopath Vincent and, naturally, the police don’t believe him.
The script is stale, the performance of Cage is wooden, while Josh Lucas, playing Vincent, seemed to be doing someone a favour to be on set.
One expected that director Simon West, who made Expendables 2, would be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat with this offering, but, clearly, this was a mission that he could not save from self-destruction.
It is no wonder that Stolen got only a token theatrical release before being dumped onto DVD.
