Cage Match: Deadfall (1993)

“Deadfall” is 90% ‘bore-noir’ and 10% Cage committing performance war crimes—and somehow, that last 10% makes it must-see madness.

IN THIS CORNER: KELLY MINTZER

The Lowdown 

Deadfall is legitimately one of the hardest movies I’ve had to write about for this column. (It is, I guess, technically at least, a movie?) But why?

Here’s the thing: Deadfall is too weird to be terrible. “Terrible” is a word I reserve for definable films. What IS Deadfall? A fever dream? A vanity project? Incontrovertible proof of nepotism and the way that rich white guys fail upwards? I don’t fucking know.

But here is the terrible and infuriating reality: I had a pretty good time watching it.

And to be clear, not because it’s good!

It is not in the same universe as good. I initially thought it was Blood Simple made by an idiot, but I was wrong. It’s Blood Simple if it had been made by Tommy Wiseau. I shit you not, friends, every choice is wrong.

In a film full of oddities, the big show is the one-two punch of Charlie Sheen and Nicolas Cage. 

Charlie Sheen, who receives shockingly high billing for being in, like, 10 minutes of a movie, plays a pool shark who is dressed way too well to be in the dive bar he’s hanging out in. He is pretentious and awful, and you can practically hear the screenwriter patting themselves on the back with every line. Someone thought they were incredibly clever when writing all of his dialogue, and every word of it is idiotic.

The Mark Twain speech, y’all.

First, he talks at length about Samuel Clemens. Now, I think most people know Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain, but whatever, I’ll allow that maybe it isn’t common knowledge. However. After he reveals that they are one and the same, he then goes on to explain WHO Mark Twain is (everyone knows who Mark Twain is) and lists multiple extremely well-known novels by Mark Twain (again, everyone knows who Mark Twain is). If you didn’t already find Sheen punchable as hell, I promise you will after Deadfall.

And then there’s…

Nicolas Cage.

And his impossible-to-understand wig.

If you told me that not one word of dialogue was written for his character and he was allowed to improvise every line after snorting an entire 8-ball, I would say, “Yeah, that checks out.” He’s doing… something. And it is huge and insane.

It’s hard to understand most of what he says because he sort of manically screams every word. He’s wearing a ridiculous wig that even the worst wigdar will immediately detect. What about that mustache? I DON’T KNOW! I suspect his wardrobe is just his clothes, partially because he is frequently wearing confusing and inappropriate tuxedos.

It is quite possibly the craziest performance he has ever given, yet, oddly, he is the most realized character in the movie, with the most distinctive and certain personality.

The Cage Factor:

I hate myself for saying this, but it’s 100 percent a Cage Fighter.

There’s a lot to hate about this movie; it’s relationship to women is GROSS (there is a particularly gratuitous sequence where an exotic dancer just sort of squeezes her boobs together-head cut off in the scene-and jiggles them in front of Nic Cage. He repeatedly calls women “mommy”, which makes me feel sort of nauseous just writing it, and truly, the writing and directing are abysmal.

There are far too many Dutch angles, and to be clear, if this movie were made by anyone besides a Coppola, it would be their first and last movie. The idea of this director having a career after this is infuriating, and I legitimately hate that. I hate the dynastic nature of Hollywood and that far more talented filmmakers have lost opportunities so that the Coppolas can remain in some sort of power.

But goddamn it, this is the Nicolas Cage I signed up for. Unrestrained, weird, doing…something. It’s impossible not to watch him. He’s bonkers in it. You have to see it to believe it.

AND IN THIS CORNER: STEPHANIE MALONE

The Lowdown 

Directed by Christopher Coppola, the lesser-known (and less talented) nephew of Francis Ford Coppola, Deadfall is a film so bafflingly bad, so misjudged on every possible level, that its very existence feels like a fever dream. It’s an assault on your senses. It’s also essential viewing. Confusing, I know, but there’s a good reason… and it’s the reason we’re all here.

Deadfall ostensibly wants to be a crime-noir about con men and double-crosses, but that ambition dies in the first ten minutes, drowned in incoherent narration, incomprehensible performances, and molasses-paced scenes that feel like outtakes from a student film. It’s a cinematic black hole of energy, style, and logic. Until one incomparable man realized he was in a movie and decided to make that movie unforgettable.

Nicolas Cage single-handedly takes this mess from disaster to transcendent trash through his total and complete refusal to act like a human being.

Nicolas Cage—God bless his weird, boundless soul—plays Eddie, a greasy, unhinged gangster who looks like he raided a Spirit Halloween “mobster” bin and wandered onto set by accident. The hairpiece? Sentient. The voice? Like a possessed jazz gremlin. The performance? Nuclear-grade Cage.

We’re talking about a performance so explosive, so irrational, so indecipherable that it transcends acting and becomes pure cosmic energy. There’s no building up to it. He’s introduced and just immediately detonates.

Take the internet-immortalized insanity of his performances in Vampire’s Kiss, The Wicker Man, and Face/Off, crank it up to eleven, and play it on loop. But the craziest part? He’s the best part of the movie. BY FAR.

When Cage is on screen, Deadfall becomes wildly entertaining, if only because you’re trying to figure out what the hell he’s doing—or if he knows. When he’s not on screen, it becomes a dead zone of mumbled exposition and inexplicably bland cinematography. It’s almost like he understood how terrible the movie was and decided to burn the whole thing down as a public service.

For horror fans, there’s one other twisted delight: Angus Scrimm (yes, Phantasm‘s Tall Man) appears in what can only be described as a cartoon villain cameo that’s ridiculous but damned delightful.

Deadfall is not a cult classic in the traditional sense, but it’s a cult-adjacent curio, ripe for rediscovery by midnight movie lovers and lovers of hilariously catastrophic cinema. How this film has not received the Rifftrax treatment is beyond me.

Brief aside: Somehow, in 2017, we were gifted (cursed?) with an unasked-for sequel/prequel called Arsenal, which we’ll be reviewing next. Pray for us.

The Cage Factor

This might be the most absurdly unhinged performance of Cage’s career, which is saying something for a man who’s screamed about bees and eaten cockroaches on screen. It’s the unpredictable thespian at his worst-best—no filter, no brakes, no coherent direction.

But what makes Deadfall special is how Cage is actually the only thing working. He’s not just distracting us from the film’s problems; he becomes the reason to keep watching. His performance is so loud, so off-the-wall, that it elevates the movie from “turn this trash off” to “holy hell, are you seeing this?!”

And yet, it’s almost never mentioned in Cage retrospectives or the ever-popular “freakout” montage reels. That’s a crime. It deserves a Criterion Collection WTF Edition. It deserves a Rifftrax, a Vinegar Syndrome deluxe release, or at the very least, a national viewing day with drinking game rules printed on the back of a barf bag.

It’s wild to wholeheartedly recommend a film that does as much wrong as this one does. But if you’re a Cage fan, you HAVE TO SEE THIS. Even if you skip through everything else and just watch his scenes on loop (which someone thankfully compiled on YouTube—not the hero we deserve but the one we need).