“Gonzo” doesn’t always mean “good,” although along with “batshit,” it’s a word that has evolved almost entirely into a breathless, admiring positive in the film-reviewing lexicon. “Gonzo” tells you your grandmother won’t like it; it says “controversial” and implies a seat-of-the-pants thrill ride in which the flaws are the very same thing as the virtues. It suggests enjoyably questionable taste and an independent-spirited, guerrilla-warfare approach to the filmmaking. And it tacitly castigates anyone who doesn’t get with it as being a stuffy, literal-minded, humorless bore — a general downer at parties. Veteran writer/director Paul Schrader‘s “Dog Eat Dog,” starring Lord of Bonkers Nicholas Cage and Duke of Batshit Willem Dafoe, made on a shoestring from a book by ex-con-turned pulp crime novelist Eddie Bunker, is by all those definitions gonzo. It’s also not very good. Excuse me while I go rearrange the canapés and put some coasters down.
Loosely speaking, it’s the story of a kidnapping gone wrong, as a three-man crew of two-strike ex-cons decide the small time is too dangerous long-term and go for One Last Big Score. The leader of the trio is Troy (Cage), only newly released from prison; the muscle is provided by Diesel (side of beef with eyes Christopher Matthew Cook); and as for the the third guy, well, his name is Mad Dog (Dafoe), so I guess he’s honor-bound to bring the crazy. Every gang’s gotta have a wildcard, as Charlie from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” would say, and the obnoxious, wheedling, drugged-out psycho Mad Dog (to be fair Dafoe devours this role with bug-eyed abandon), is definitely wild. We know this because the opening scene, filtered in slick reds and pinks, is of him trying to cajole his coked-up way back into his overweight ex-girlfriend’s good graces and when she demurs, slitting her throat, stabbing her repeatedly and then murdering her young daughter as she begs for her life. These killings are offered up as evidence of just what a mad dog Mad Dog is, but also, happening up top of the film, show Schrader throwing down an early marker for his movie’s arch bad taste, stylized violence and misogyny, lest we thought he was making “The Lady In The Van.”
Troy, Diesel and Mad Dog (a trio of names that feels like it should be immortalized in an Ed Hardy tattoo) are approached by a shady middleman (Schrader himself) to kidnap a baby, for the convoluted reason that the baby’s father owes a lot of money to a local gangster and the gangster wants to give him an extra reason to pay up. But the operation goes south, unsurprisingly, due to a trigger-happy Mad Dog, and the gang find themselves on the lam again, having already agreed they’d rather die than go back inside.
It’s no surprise to learn that the part of Mad Dog was originally meant for Cage, though his “Wild At Heart” co-star Dafoe’s embodiment of the unhinged yet oddly needy sicko is the undoubted highlight of the film. By contrast, Cage’s Troy is relatively sedate, except for a bizarre aside, which feels very inorganic to Matthew Wilder‘s screenplay, about how he looks like Humphrey Bogart, which is only there because it allows Cage to play one entire scene doing a (quite poor) Bogey impression. It’s a totally unmotivated flourish, but then, lack of discernible motivation or even coherent logic from one scene to the next appears to be a point of pride in “Dog Eat Dog.” It’s what the film’s fans might term “deconstruction,” but it feels too random and slipshod to be making anything like such a grand statement. Is it deconstructed or just badly constructed?
Schrader’s last film with Cage, “The Dying Of The Light,” was famously a disaster, taken away from the filmmaker and recut by the studio, after which the whole team refused to promote the deeply compromised theatrical edit. And the story goes that “Dog Eat Dog” is partially a response to that trying experience, made at a very low budget just so that Schrader could retain control. But while the scrappy-little-underdog narrative holds true in regards to its low budget, its entrepreneurial spirit, and its conscious divorcing of itself from the acceptable mainstream, in actual content “Dog Eat Dog” is tiresomely overfamiliar. This is a world we’ve seen all too often before, composed of sleazy strip clubs and cocaine parties in hotel rooms (there’s a bizarrely homoerotic scene, incidentally, in which the three of them look close to having a pillow fight) populated by men who glory in the musk of violence, and women who are either their victims, or strippers, or both. Something sticks in the craw of a movie being labeled subversive or provocative when the most boneheaded bro in the world could guffaw his way through it without having a single one of his unreconstructed attitudes or values challenged.
Schrader has said that his one direction to cast and crew here was “never be boring.” But that seems to have been interpreted as “never be coherent,” implemented with dutch angles and color filters, Humphrey Bogart impressions and gratuitous bloodletting. All of which might sound like a blast on paper, but no matter how wacky the individual components are, if they have no place in the grander architecture of a story or a theme or some sort of point, boring is exactly what they become. Even within Schrader’s own back catalogue, “Dog Eat Dog” feels like a lukewarm retread of elements he has achieved, as a writer and director, much better before. It’s just that here they’re mashed together gracelessly, with a kind of bullying undercurrent, as though designed to get a rise out of you, just so it can deliver two for flinching. [C-]
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