The Old Way

MOVIE #1,290 • 🍿🍿🍿 • 12.21.23 Starting in 2020, I decided to watch & review the entire Nicolas Cage filmography in alphabetical order. This is 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 – Chapter 54. We recently examined a very rare Cage cameo role for this series and now we have another rarity (and first): the Cage western. I’ve reviewed 54 of his films now and this is the only one that could be classified as such (and glancing at the movies to come, there’s maybe 1-2 more at most). Spoilers: I didn’t like this one, and I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the man is simply not suited for his genre (and I’m not 100% sure why). But I do appreciate how, despite his recent Renaissance, Cage is still popping up in movies that have over a half dozen production bumpers and Clint Howard is the fourth name on the opening credits. We open on an attempted hanging and Cage has the funniest mustache he's ever worn...

So Cage helps disrupt the hanging only to then murder the guy he sorta just saved? It doesn't matter, as we time-jump twenty years into the future with a mustache-less Cage on a wonderful Wyoming farm with his much younger wife hanging laundry. He walks their daughter (whom he seems to hate?) to school as she bitches about why they didn't take the horse…


This Copeland rip-off score is immediately annoying but it's perfect for what looks like a horrible movie that deserves nothing less. Cage is a store owner now. He's stoic and cold. A guy comes into the story blathering about how shit running off from his outhouse has infected his apple trees and now all his apples taste like shit. He tries to steal some jellybeans but Cage's daughter catches him and he puts them back. She's concerned that his hands were dirty so she proceeds to clean every individual jellybean. OK!

A creepy guy and his crew shows up and confronts Cage’s wife back at home. She kicks Clint Howard in the balls…


She tries to escape on horseback but they shoot her horse. It's partially revealed that the wife knows about her husband's dangerous past before they kill her and take off. A group of useless U.S. Marshals show up and Cage buries his wife. The lead Marshal is also aware of the legend of Colton Briggs (that's Cage but I'm just gonna call him Cage as per usual). While he's digging the grave, this dude starts waxing poetic to the daughter for some reason…


The massive leaps this guy is making are truly something. Cage tries to get him to give up the names of these killers they're supposedly tracking (they're really wasting a shit load of time hanging out at the Cage farm). He tells Cage that “as long as that little girl is alive, there's no room for vengeance in your life,” and I'm sure Cage will follow this advice. In the barn, the killers have written “I OWE YOU MORE” in blood on the wall. Cage cries and then loads up his guns. Then he goes up to the loft to kill his own daughter…


Even though it makes no sense, the fact that he's so callous and plainly hateful towards his only daughter is interesting in an unexpected WTF kind of way. I'm sure the plot will revolve around him building a relationship with her but it's not like they've been estranged. He's been in her life since birth. Strange shit.

Anyway, they take off on the revenge mission together while the Marshals gets into a shootout with the Clint Howard gang. They take a few losses before Cage and daughter catch up with them. One of the Marshal lackeys wants to blow her little head off..


Like father, like daughter. Cage gets his offspring to help torture information out of these guys and the Marshal immediately folds, giving up all the dirt he has on the guys who killed his wife. So they pick up the trail and Cage delivers a mini monologue that I'm sure the screenwriters thought was amazing…


Then two minutes later, he delivers another, much longer one…


These are the worst parts of movies like this: when the schlockmeisters feel like they need to lean into gravitas and the only way they can do it is with a fireside speech. But it's something to see Cage really bring out the waterworks which he rarely does in films of this caliber.

Then Clint Howard gets his fingers broken for falling asleep on guard duty...


Cage is closing in on the villains and tasks his daughter with scoping out the town they're staying in. She repeats the "shit apple story" she heard earlier in the general store before getting immediately kidnapped by the bad dude crew. We learn that the head guy was the little kid Cage killed in the beginning of the movie, which if you couldn't see that coming...I'm sorry, movies might not be for you.

There's only 15 minutes left so Cage starts killing people. It was sad to see Clint Howard go…


And, sure, also Cage. RIP? The little girl is an orphan now but she gets to keep the bad guy's Mexican money for some reason. The Marshal just tells her to go home and take care of her daddy's store? She's 12. Anyway that's how this shit ends.

This one is a big-time slog. It's not fun in the way his later 2010s VOD trash is either. I also don't think he's suited for westerns. I'm not quite sure why but something about his aesthetic and vibe just doesn't translate in the genre.


THE VERDICT: 3 CAGES OUT OF 10 • CLICK HERE for all 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 Chapters + Ongoing Rankings.

And so that's all she wrote for "The Year of Cage" for this year. I will pick things up again in late February/March when I'll be taking a look at five movies from earlier in the alphabet that I either accidentally skipped over or came out after this series started. See ya then!

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,289 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,291 ⫸

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The Old Way is a 2023 American Western film directed by Brett Donowho, from a screenplay by Carl W. Lucas, and starring Nicolas Cage as a retired gunman on a mission to find the outlaws who killed his wife. It was released on January 6, 2023.