After being forced to drive a mysterious passenger at gunpoint, a man finds himself in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse where it becomes clear that not everything is as it seems.
Can I just be forward with it and say “Sympathy For The Devil” didn’t do much to impress me? Like, at all? Outside of the expected Nicolas Cage manic performance banter that swings for the fences, everything else that it has to offer feels nothing short of arbitrary.
This is my first exposure to Yuval Alder as a director and I’m not sure if I’m in a hurry to see what he does next. He falls short in trying to give this movie any kind of a distinctive voice, through no fault of his own, and the presentation doesn’t give him much space to maneuver around and make room for something intriguing. Don’t get me wrong, what he has is still competent….but it’s also nothing to write home about.
Technically speaking, everything here was screaming for a higher budget but what they had to make do with is the dictionary definition of middling returns. While the production design is, for lack of a better word, functional, it also doesn’t mesh well with the intended air of claustrophobia and comes off as window dressing. For every tiny bit of decent dialogue or solid line-delivery, the rest are fairly generic, costumes are nothing to write home about and the atmosphere supplied loses its dramatic appeal of unease and uncertainty as tension slowly dissipates away the longer the film drags on. Its intended uses for violence are neutered, very minimal and hamstrung by the budget and what I can I say about the music that’s so drab and muted out it doesn’t give me much to talk about?
Editing-wise though, the final result is cogent and durable, the neon lighting did bring life to several scenes and Steven Holleran’s use of the camera gets in some occasionally cool shots every once in a while but still manages to be fairly pedestrian.
And while the acting is good, it could’ve been great. Nic Cage and Joel Kinnaman make the most of the limited dimensions of both their characters; the former highlighting his eclectic range as ANOTHER deranged madman and the former embodying the full distress of someone stuck in a problem he can’t understand or work his way out of. But the camera can’t capture the full nuances of both men’s performances because of how restrictive everything else is.
There is little narrative bedrock for the plot to cling to outside of being a clone of Collateral and the few attempts at a plot that are there are by-the-numbers at best and clunky at worst. Sure, it feels taut and lean on the surface but even as far as minimalist plot structures go, not much here is taken advantage of to sell the entire picture as an intriguing mystery or an effective character study. Most of, if not all the beats you expect this story to run through, it does it well enough to where it doesn’t feel like it’s running on autopilot but it changes nothing regarding how begrudgingly safe this story inevitably becomes, ESPECIALLY with how slowly the story trundles along…..and it’s only 90 minutes long. And even when the story does potentially lean into some horror trappings or supernatural elements, they’re executed so late or hold so little value in the overall crux of this sparse story that you can’t help but wonder “Was this meant to be a short film?”
It does attempt to delve into how everyone has their own griefs and traumas and how it turns them into the person they are, subconsciously or otherwise; whether or not someone who’s a Devil in someone else’s eyes deserves a second chance at redemption. But between the predictable manner of the otherwise cryptic plot progression and the lack of any definitive character depth and/or growth, it all feels like a waste of time. Any attempt at executing its themes, morals or messages seemed to have been purposely ground out until the story is just blank white paste, so we waste a full hour and a half following characters that are complete ciphers in a story that BARELY goes anywhere.
Unlike Collateral, which manages to explore its central characters in interesting and surprisingly deep ways while still being constantly entertaining, this film succeeds at achieving only the latter and even that is in VERY brief, VERY loosely scattered spades.
