Any film that promotes Nic Cage as an Academy Award winner must be trying to hard to get people interested. Admittedly, yes, Nic Cage IS an Oscar winner (he scooped up the Best Actor award for Leaving Las Vegas. If you want to see the height of Nic Cage brilliance, it is that film as well as Raising Arizona.)
Nowadays, Cage crazy antics far out-strip the accolade. Luckily for us, his hair-raising bonkers behaviour is also a part of the lacklustre and terrible Southern Fury.
The only good part.
Directed by Southern Fury, otherwise known as Arsenal, revolves around the intertwiing stories of the Lindel brothers: Siblings who have relied on one another for years. Going seperate ways – Mikey a mobster an JP a small owner of a construction company – they have still remained close. However, when Mikey is kidnapped, it is up to JP to hunt down ruthless crime boss Eddie King with the help of his old pal Sal.
Save your eye balls with this film and simply enjoy this picture of Nic Cage instead.
Yes. He looks bonkers but him and John Cusack are pretty much the best things within the film. Cusack has had a frustrating and severe decline in movies lately, almost disappearing into independents. Here, he somewhat reminds us that he is actually a talented actor although that isn’t particularly hard to do in Southern Fury.
Despite having massive names that could, possibly, bring in a crowd, they are thrown to the sideline as we have to enjoy a tedious romp. Despite the title(s), Southern Fury is anything but furious and, instead, a garish attempt at noir deep south action flicks such as Hell or High Water. The movie is slow. Really slow. Too slow. You will, inevitably, fall asleep. Even the gun sequences and bloody red stuff that splatter on the screen is boring. Dull. So desperately dull.
It’s all made worse because the story has been done before. The exhausting trope of one wayward brother and his “sensible” and more “honest” brother has to kill a bunch of folk is the core of Southern Fury. It’s not even embellished in a way that you could arguably warm too. Instead, you have to enjoy horrendous dialogue, predictable character decisions, and the most impossibly drawling movie ever made. The characters and actors are wasted, the plot is the slowest unfolding yarn ever, and the whole film is coated in this typical Southern thriller grading that you get with low-budget action films nowadays. Everything ticks a box in an alarmingly predictable manner.
Southern Fury has a tepid cinema release and is completely available on VOD. I guess the appeal of lead actor Adrien Grenier from Entourage and, as always, Nic Cage’s hair could lure some wayward film fans in…
However, truthfully, there are better and more appealing movies out there. I don’t want to be harsh to say you’ll be wasting your time, but certainly put it closer to the end of your movie-watching pile.
The pictures of Nic Cage will be enough to satisfy your need.
Southern Fury is out in cinemas now.
