There’s also something weirdly satisfying about watching him clean the grime off the restaurant, like one of those reality-TV shows in which middle-aged ladies with rubber gloves scrub the homes of hoarders, but with added demons.

Willy’s Wonderland review – Nicolas Cage cleans up in gory

Across the 2010s, there were a number of films in which the 57-year-old Academy Award-winner embraced his singular larger-than-life acting style, elevating his approach to new heights. The great character actor Beth Grant ( Mrs Sometimes I Doubt Your Commitment to Sparkle Motion in Donnie Darko) plays the local sheriff who gets to give the big explication monologue about the building’s history, real estate deals and satanic possession. Nicolas Cage has delivered many exceptional performances across his career in such efforts as Adaptation, Leaving Las Vegas, Wild at Heart, Raising Arizona… the list goes on.

It isn’t even that conventional, but it can’t help coming off as “normal” when bookended by the Lewis and Sono movies. It’s a waking nightmare made of gore, suffering, and hallucinatory slow-mo, soundtracked by Cage’s inchoate howls of rage and grief over his lost love Mandy (Andrea Riseborough).

Willy Cage - Etsy UK

The Governor hooks Hero up with a bodysuit rigged with explosives set to blow if he mishandles Bernice, if he tries to take the suit off, or if he fails the task. John Stamos Snapped At Elizabeth Taylor While Filming 'General Hospital': "Get That Old Lady Out Of My Eye Line! Pig reads like an intentional divergence from these two movies, where Cage draws back on the most overt qualities his followers have come to associate with his acting — the histrionics, the noisiness, the genre-centricity — in exchange for a role that allows Cage room for presentational flourishes even couched in realness. he roars in a rousing climatic speech to the Ghostland’s citizens, inciting them to fight the Governor’s pervy tyranny. Casting a deep intertextual shadow over proceedings is the spirit of Chuck E Cheese, the string of franchised restaurants featuring oversized mechanical puppets founded in the US in the early 80s that scarred the psyches of people such as Willy’s Wonderland director Kevin Lewis.The Janitor tears each of them apart one by one and piece by piece, with zero explanation given to his apparent super-strength and super-endurance. The film was released through video on demand courtesy of Screen Media Films, and was initially scheduled for theatrical release in October 2021. As John Serba wrote in his review for Decider, Nicolas Cage “makes many cruddy, cruddy movies now, and phones it in on some of them, and this is definitely one of them … [ Willy’s Wonderland is] one very silly idea that lacks the necessary bunch of smaller, sillier ideas in support. It’s the effect of the relationship Cage has fostered with the camera and with moviegoers for years, from Raising Arizona to Vampire’s Kiss, from Mom and Dad to Mandy to Color Out of Space, from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse to now.

Willy’s Wonderland: Where to watch UK - streaming services

By now, Cage is such a master of his style that his viewers know he’s speaking to them and to their expectations of him, even when he doesn’t appear to be. Attention has now turned to Willy’s Wonderland, a 2021 movie starring Nic as The Janitor, who is pitted against animatronic animals during a wild night of survival. If you had told me three days ago that I’d be standing here with one arm and one testicle, trying to reason with you bitches, I would have said ‘impossible,’ too. We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from. But Willy’s Wonderland and Pig show the same commitment to the defining awareness of his acting style.The moment contrasts nicely with Cage’s best work in Mandy, a solo scene where he fixates on and rages at the camera, screaming like a man gone mad. It’s a moment that clangs against the essence of Cage as shown in both Willy’s Wonderland and Prisoners of the Ghostland. Cage is a conscious actor, but he’s never self-conscious — he builds his performances on a foundation of deliberate choices, even if those choices come across as outlandish at first blush.