The Retirement Plan is another one of those action comedy thrillers where a person is secretly a government agent or in this case retired agent who can kill someone with his bare hands as if it’s nothing. And said agent is estranged from a family member who never knew the truth but needs the help through a complicated plot to acquire some MacGuffin item that has gotten them in trouble.
It seems the action heroes of the last quarter of the 20th Century are now at that age where they make these movies. Was Nicholas Cage a true action hero or did he just have a few hit movies (The Rock, Con Air, Face/Off) before his career went sideways for about a decade or so? For the most part, Cage is really the best thing to watch here in this movie that is too problematic. He’s a retired CIA assassin living in the Caymans. His name is Matt or Jim, depending on who you’re talking to.
He’s been estranged from his daughter, Ashley (Ashley Greene), for years, but now she needs her help as her partner, Jimmy (Jordan Johnson-Hinds) got mixed up with a mobster boss, Donnie (Jackie Earle Haley overacting) who works for an even bigger crime lord, Hector Garcia (Grace Byers), who orders her henchmen to murder the husband of her accountant who skims $16,000. There’s a lot of characters here and the filmmakers introduce them with a freeze-frame as their name appears in color graphics on the screen.
But even still, you lose track of the characters not because they’re a lot but because they all all seem to be doing this for a retirement annuity. Ron Perlman plays one of Donnie’s lieutenants, Bobo, who finds himself accidentally kidnapping Ashley’s daughter, Sarah (Thaila Campbell), who he bonds with somewhat. It really makes no sense how Sarah would stay when she has multiple opportunities to run or even lock Bobo out of a hotel room when he goes out in the hallway to make a phone call.
Cage seems to sleepwalk through the role except for the action scenes. Byers isn’t as terrifying as she was probably meant to be written and the Hector character is also a cliched trope. Haley can be terrifying and I guess the joke is since he’s a shorter actor than the hulking henchmen, they are terrified of him. But mostly, he seems to act like a spoiled brat throwing a tantrum in the cereal aisle.
The problem is despite its cast, it looks like one of those movies actors take for paychecks. Filmed in 2021, Cage has been open the last few years about how he made movies left and right to pay off a massive debt. If you’re going to do a movie for money, you might as well go to the Caymans to have some fun. But it looks like one of his B-movies that went direct-to-DVD. In fact, the movie released in September is considered his worst wide release only getting about $750,000 at the box office off a budget of about $20 million. I suspect some money was found to give it a theatrical release after the critical acclaim of Pig and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
Director Tim Brown, who also wrote the script, has directed five other movies, of which I haven’t heard of and produced at least two dozen movies that I haven’t heard of either. He probably thought he hit the jackpot with actors like Cage, Perlman, Haley, Ernie Hudson and Lynn Whitfield, who plays a governmental supervisor. Unfortunately, there should have been better material. Aside from being startled when he meets Sarah, there is no classic Nic Cage freak-out. And the jokes don’t lands as good as they should.
I mean, you have a grey-long haired and bearded Nic Cage looking like he’s on his way or coming from a Jimmy Buffett concert yet there is nothing much there even though Cage does his best with the role. Maybe it’s because the TV series The Old Man did this a lot better.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 