Dog Eat Dog (2016) 1/2

Dog Eat Dog is about a trio of criminals (Nicholas cage, Willem DaFoe, and Christopher Matthew Cook) that are trying to get a big score. Their big score is kidnapping a baby. It goes down the toiler. Messy, so very messy.

This film is an incoherent piece of trash. The plot is all over the place and leaves so much hanging out to no resolution. It's like a building that is midway through its demolition. Hallways lead to oblivion and pieces of junk just sticking here and there with no real purpose anymore. Junior high schoolers could write a better script than this. The stories that children develop when playing with a menagerie of action figures are better than this. I can't really say that the ending is satisfying because there is nothing satisfying in this film. It goes for a cheap shock to introduce the film and really just sits there spinning its wheels for the remainder of the film.

The acting is hammy and over the top. Cage continues to bury his once great career in another garbage film with another garbage performance. He goes overboard ala The Wicker Man and does a terrible Bogart impression. Let this be a lesson to everyone out there to pay yout taxes or you'll have to be in crap like Dog eat Dog. Dafoe isn't as far down the shoot as Cage is career wise, but if he keeps appearing in films like this his legacy will be torched by the easy paychecks films like this must pay. He plays a parody of himself. It's a miserable experience because he doesn't really have anything to work with and an over the edge Dafoe isn't anything new. Been there and done that in much better films. The rest of the acting is pedestrian at best and does nothing to carry the film higher than mediocre.

Finally we get to director Paul Schrader, a darling of cinema thirty years ago gives us a film that can really be summed up as a cliche of 1990's cinema. Most of the hip artistic tricks that he employs in this film were being used by Oliver Stone 20 years ago. Sorry Paul, but movies have grown past that, for better or for worse and in a better film they may have lent to telling the story more, but with Dog Eat Dog it just makes you want to watch Natural Born Killers. Schrader is another casualty in this "film".

Dog Eat Dog really is a cliche. Acting, directing. Everyone does the typical stuff and delivers nothing beyond what they get paid for. To be truthful, the script is not a cliche. If it were this film may have been better. Average, but that would be better than what we have now. This film is written terribly at the expense of trying to be cool. It tries way too hard and falls right on its face. Not very cool. This film will be remembered for being horrible as it buries the three talents associated with it.