This espionage film comes out under a significant and foreboding cloud. Removed from highly regarded director Paul Schrader's control by the financiers during post-production, it is a film disowned by its creators. Schrader, leading man Nicolas Cage, co-star Anton Yelchin, and executive producer Nicolas Winding Refn posted pictures of themselves online wearing t-shirts emblazoned with their contracts' non-disparagement clauses. An interesting form of social-media protest: turning a contractual obligation not to criticize a film into a vehicle of criticism.

As for the finished film (product?) regarded apart from the context of its production as much as one can, it is captivating, yet uneven. For every two virtues, there is a blemish, and it is frustrating. Cage, exuding exhaustion and his hair greyed, delivers one of his finest performances of recent years as a CIA veteran diagnosed with degenerative frontotemporal dementia. As his mind and body begin to betray him, he races to tie the most haunting loose end of his career: finding and punishing an elusive radical who nearly tortured him to death two decades ago. Suspense films of this nature often find their protagonists racing against time in one way or another (defuse a bomb, save an abducted child). Here, he is racing against mortality, and it is a poignant twist. There is a fantastic scene early on in which he delivers a speech to the agency's new recruits, at first chastising them for embracing an ugly beast such as the CIA, with its in-house political gamesmanship and questionable post-9/11 record, but then praising them for heeding the call of public service despite any cynical misgivings. As performed by Cage, the speech seems two-thirds sentimental bull, one-third deeply felt and pleading.

Though the actor is always charismatic, the Anton Yelchin character is a bit inexplicable. I never entirely believed this fresh-faced agent would sacrifice his career and maybe even his life to help his mentor with an extrajudicial manhunt. He seems a contrived inclusion to give the often despondent and unstable antihero a vigorous, youthful, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit-esque counterpart. And the film simply falls apart in its final 20 minutes, an unsatisfying and rushed blur of gunfire, gory vengeance, and inadequate lunges toward catharsis.

C+

This is the 200th 2014 release I watched.

Dying of the Light

Complete trash. I've had it with Nicolas Cage. I see all of his films but they are just shit now; Outcast, Joe, Dying of the Light, Left Behind, Rage, Stolen, Trespass, Season of the Witch etc. This was the last straw. I will not watch another Cage unless it gets a non-limited theatrical release.

Ok, so Dying of the Light. It's shit, but how shit? It's Crap Screenwriting 101. It's a CIA analyst with mental issues (dependent on drugs to control his outbursts) in the hunt to capture Muhammad Banir, a Muslim terrorist from 22 years ago that went into hiding. Sound familiar? Yes. It's the slightly adapted male version of Homeland Season 4. Even the villain sounds the same (Nazir and Banir). It's lazy and stupid. The film starts with Cage saying how the CIA has values, then later he talks with his boss about bringing Banir back to the US for trial because the CIA has values. But at the end of the film, he kills Banir. So where are those fucking values?? Oh, and the best part is that he kills him with his FINGER!!!! lol

Anton Yelchin is probably the most uncharismatic bad actor working today. How do people like this even get work? Just awful. Dying of the Light has all the trademarks of a piece of shit; the same score that gets passed around all DTV movies, shaky cam to fake some sort of intensity and excitement in a chase sequence, utterly crap dialogue, and Nicolas Cage. It really is hard to believe that this guy is an Oscar winner.

F