 | MOVIE #1,467 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 03.21.24 Starting in 2020, I decided to watch & review the entire Nicolas Cage filmography in alphabetical order. This is 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 – Chapter 58. Of all the serials I do on this website, my Cage reviews simultaneously bring me the most joy and anguish in equal parts. Because of my dedication to the video-heavy plot recap critique style, I have to watch these in a different fashion (I essentially write the reviews as I view the picture, taking note of which clips I want to edit out with timestamps, etc). It’s tedious but also a nice way to mix things up. Like Cage and his choice of acting roles, I contain multitudes. In my pursuit to create the internet's best and most thorough resource of all things Cage, it is my duty. And I am bound by this duty to give every entry equal care and attention, for better or worse. |
The action begins with Cage driving against just an absolute hellish green screen. A CGI drone flies by with a message for Cage, who then records a voice memo about the purpose of his mission…
We see billboards and TV ads for something called “New Eden.” When he arrives for his appointment with an elderly man who has been deemed “a burden to the system,” things do not go smoothly…
That photoshopped picture with Trump is so good (I also appreciate how it's not inserted with much or any political weight — like they would have/could have used whomever was the current President — but it's certainly funnier that it's Trump)…
I can already tell I'm gonna like this one. It has all the earmarks of those bad (but interesting) things I love: looks terrible, goofy sci-fi premise, a mostly checked-out seeming Cage, which as I've mentioned countless times is more of a rarity than you might think, and therefore, at this point, intriguing. That’s the difference between bad movies that work and bad ones that don’t, and oftentimes the genre dictates this as much as anything else. If a movie is shoddily made + boring (like 211, for example), there’s really no going back. But there’s a glimmer of hope in the badness here that’s evident right from the get-go.
Cage's boss back at the Bureau is so thrilled with his ability to shoot an old man (the former governor of Colorado now reduced to living in squalor among maggots, we find out) that he is up for a promotion. His next assignment is to visit a mother and son living alone in the desert. How are these two a burden on humanity? They live in the middle of nowhere. Who gives a shit? Even if it still doesn't make sense, we get a little more details about how this system works, though…
Although he's up for a promotion, the boss man is looking into Cage in a suspicious fashion. Back at the little desert home, Cage has dinner with this family. He doesn't understand why they even want to stay there. But Cage tells them that the Bureau has deemed they must be transferred to New Eden and so mom slaps him.
He gets a stay on their deportation order so the boy can sing at a school recital. The next day he gets a cryptic message written from a card he found on the dead old man's body. He meets up with a ponytail guy who gives him a flash drive. There's something that stuns Cage on that drive but the audience doesn't get to see what it is. Cage goes to the boy's choral recital and walks in as they finish singing “Amazing Grace.”
Later that night at their home, he gives mom a can of coffee, extremely rare in this world. He sleeps in his car and has a dream about fly fishing. He comes inside in a panic and instructs mom and son that they have to leave now. Out of nowhere, his boss is there with a gun to mom's head. The kid shoots him with a BB gun and he and Cage fight. A caravan of agents pull up BUT Cage and the fam have already escaped.
Bad boss man lost his eye in the scuffle and now has a cool eye patch so he is Eye Patch now. Eye Patch meets with a couple of other Bureau top dogs for some more exposition…
More and more it's being insinuated that this New Eden is not such a nice place, ya know? “I believe that’s a child’s tooth.” These two higher-ups are never seen on camera again.
Cage wants to take them to Jackfish Lake in Canada, but mom says there are no lakes anymore. The kid is still excited to go.
Eye Patch goes to Cage's apartment to snoop and he eats something very gross out of a can for some reason…
Seriously, that’s the weirdest thing in this entire moment.
Cage then tries to swap his car at a garage off the highway so they will be harder to find. Oh, I forgot to mention he drives a tricked-out El Camino. He trades it for a station wagon, bottled water and canned beans.
Eye Patch meets the ponytail guy, who is a defense department contractor turned informant for a movement attempting to reveal the truth about New Eden. He tells Eye Patch that he gave Cage the goods on this mysterious place.
Back on their journey, Cage and the crew run into mountain punks living off the grid. This has a very old school quest feel to it despite the DTV-grade post apocalyptic adjacent setting. Mountain man gives Cage a radiation detector and iodine tablets. He also details the safest path over the border. He tells them anyone they run into will rape both the mom and the boy. Jesus.
Meanwhile, Eye Patch discovers that the mom is not who she appears to be. She assumed the identity of a dead person. He starts assembling clues but we don't get any more real information just yet.
Somewhere in Montana, the station wagon gets picked up by a drone so they have to pull off and wait for it to skedaddle. This is a funny bit reminiscent of a family on a long road trip (I've been there) and it’s the only time where Cage gets even a little bit worked up...
Then we finally learn that New Eden is, in fact, essentially a concentration camp, the details revealed via flashback to Cage accessing the drive. Plus, one other big nugget you probably saw coming…
So Cage is the kid's dad, giving this another layer of intrigue, however forced. He shoots out the tires of an SUV following them and they make it to an abandoned plant to regroup. While the kid is taking a shit, he's greeted by Eye Patch. Eye Patch is a very sneaky guy. Before you know it, they're in a big but brief CGI-enhanced gun fight…
Cage and mom escape but they leave the kid behind. He steals Eye Patch’s false eye lol…
The boy escapes their clutches by pretending to go fetch the eyeball (LOL) and later, by a campfire, the really REAL truth about mom and child is revealed…
So Cage had sex with the woman whose identity she stole, who then she also happened to kill because she wanted to sell her son, and so she just assumed the role of mother and never told the boy? Got it.
Eye Patch tells his lackey that they're on the wrong side of history (he reveals 7 million have been killed in this genocide , so uh yeah). But they both just shrug it off, as one does.
Their wagon breaks down right before the border, allowing the bad guys to catch them and they immediately shoot the mom in the head…
Cage gets them to agree to release the boy if he hands over the flash drive. They come to an agreement and the kid runs off into the snowy woods (which, not sure what the plan was there). But the flash drive is apparently empty so Eye Patch shoots Cage in the head! Whoa. Did not see this coming…
Then a character who we've never seen shoots all of the agents dead and rescues the boy. He discovers that hidden inside the rabbit foot that Cage had given his son is the real flash drive. It includes a video message from Cage…
This, naturally, sets off yet another Civil War, which the film shows via stock footage of riots, which… is a choice (a choice you make when you don’t have the budget to shoot a Civil War). The film ends with the boy finally getting to visit the lake his daddy used to fish at.
This is, by all accounts, a pretty horrible movie. It came and went in the blink of an eye before it was relegated to Tubi hell for (hopefully) all of eternity. My brain is probably too Cage-pilled at this point to come up with any other conclusion, but I kinda liked it. The plot is goofy, sure, but it’s not convoluted. And I’ve grown to like these more stoic Cage performances that are too often dismissed as not giving shit (I still can’t vouch for the recent westerns, however). Look, I’m not saying I’m gonna bang down the door to see director Rob W. King’s follow-up, the 2018 Cusack/Ricci vehicle, Distorted but also yes I’m definitely going to see that movie at some point, please don’t judge me.
Next week’s A-Z ‘missed entry’ departure is the strangest one yet, without a doubt. And you’re gonna have to tune back in to see what it is.
THE VERDICT: 6 CAGES OUT OF 10 • CLICK HERE for all 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 Chapters + Ongoing Rankings.
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,465 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,468 ⫸
⫷ MOVIE #1,465 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,468 ⫸
The Humanity Bureau is a 2018 Canadian science fiction thriller film directed by Rob W. King and written by Dave Schultz. The film stars Nicolas Cage, Sarah Lind, Hugh Dillon and Jakob Davies. It was released on April 6, 2018.
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