Rage (FILM REVIEW)
Rage
Film Review
by Kam Williams
Shades of “Taken” Abound in Gruesome Nicolas Cage Vigilante Vehicle
In recent years, Nicholas Cage has
made a lot of mediocre movies, and Rage is no exception. This B-movie action
flick might be best thought of as an unapologetic rip-off of the Liam Neeson
vigilante vehicle Taken.
But where Neeson was a retired CIA
agent, Cage plays a reformed ex-con. And while the former was frantically
searching for his missing daughter, the latter is looking for whoever fired a
fatal bullet into the head of his sweet 16 year-old daughter. As for the villains,
Taken’s were Albanian sex traffickers while Rage’s are Russian mobsters.
Otherwise, the stories are similar
enough to warrant a comparison. At the point of departure we find Paul Maguire
(Cage) and his trophy wife, Vanessa (Rachel Nichols), bidding his daughter (Aubrey
Peeples) adieu for
the evening as they head out to dinner at a local restaurant. The
overprotective father makes a point of impressing upon Caitlin’s boyfriend,
Mike (Max Fowler), that he doesn’t want any hanky-panky on the premises in his
absence.
However, what actually transpires
proves to be far worse than anything he imagined, for he gets a call from
Detective St. John (Danny Glover) informing him of a break-in back at the
house. Turns out that Caitlin’s been kidnapped and, based on the clues supplied
by Mike, Paul suspects that her abductors might be the same ruthless Russian
gang he’d had the temerity to rip off 19 years earlier.
Sadly,
her lifeless body is soon discovered, and all the evidence points to the
posse’s kingpin, Chernov (Pasha D. Lychnikoff). So, rather than
let the police solve the crime, Paul
opts to take the law into his own hands, and rounds up a couple of his tough buddies
(Max Ryan and Michael McGrady) before embarking on a
revenge-fueled reign of terror armed to the teeth.
Gritty and gruesome,
Rage is an unapologetic splatterfest featuring pyrotechnics, pistol-whipping, stabbing
and slow-motion senseless slaughter murders via sawed-off shotgun. The body
count gets pretty high en route to the protagonists’ surprising showdown with
Chernov, a barrel-chested Vladimir Putin lookalike.
Think Taken with a heckuva
twist!
Good (2 stars)
Unrated
Running time: 98 minutes
Distributor: RLJ/Image
Entertainment
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