Outcast (2014)

Simply A Masterpiece

People are voting emotionally.

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Jacob (Hayden Christensen) and Glenn (Nicolas Cage) are 12th century crusaders fighting in an unnamed city. Jacob can go into a beserker mode when he says, "God wills it" or when someone else says, "Kill him." Glenn is regretful about the crusades and opts to go East.The film then opens up in the East with some palace intrigue and a plot evolving like "Star Wars" where a princess and her brother flee from the Black Guards. They find assistance in Jacob, an opium addict, who still has his beserker mode working.The film is formulaic as you know exactly what the final fight will be. Cage haters can add this to their list of bad performances, one I would say was worse than "Left Behind." WOW! What was that accent supposed to be? Hayden Christenson started out with a strong accent and ended the film without one.Will work as a second tier rental.Guide: F-bomb near end. No sex or nudity

The acting is good enough to be believed, i.e. all the emotions and interactions are real enough that you can forget it is acting. There are some editing decisions which leave gaps in the story but not enough so that you cannot deduce what has happened. Just enough to keep you interested. (e.g. how did Jacob get from the middle east to the far east?) The jealous son kills his father when he learns he has been passed over in the line of succession, then sends soldiers to kill his brother and sister. They happen upon Jacob who is in the far east smoking opium to forget the horrors of battle in the middle east. He sees them about to be slaughtered and saves them, then agrees to escort them to safety. Much adventure follows, heroic actions, unbelievable fight scenes and escapes. You can guess it is going to be something like this just from the advertisements and previews for the film. So I was not surprised or disappointed when that was what I saw. It is the kind of entertainment I expected and it was enjoyable.

I expected to see a low-budget Netflix B-movie and I saw a low-budget Netflix B-movie. That considered, it wasn't that bad. Nicholas Cage and the two youngest characters were terrible as far as acting goes, but everyone else did fine and Hayden Christensen really carried the movie. The fight scenes were good, sufficient blood was shed, the costuming and landscapes were very well done, and it was entertaining, if not memorable. The plot brought down the movie because it was so blatantly obvious from the beginning that at times we forgot there even was one, and the camera work was ehh, but the film was, overall, on the better side of B-movies. This would be a great movie to watch while multi- tasking.

That could explain the apparent love for this movie in some quarters. The same people would like to blame all the negative reviews on Nicolas Cage haters. Well, I'm not a Cage hater. In fact, I think when he's on point he's great. He's been in some terrific movies. This just isn't one of them. The acting is bad, all around. (Or more accurately in the case of the Chinese cast, the dialog they were given didn't allow believable acting.) The vaguely British Isles accents of the two leads are spotty. The dialog is clichéd. The characters uniformly lack any real back story, unless you consider scenes of mayhem and suffering in the middle east during the crusades and an archery lesson in one character's childhood to be sufficient. Of course, the plot was so simple you could easily claim that back stories would have been superfluous. This is not a character-driven movie. In terms of cinematography, the camera work during the fight scenes is bad (it's fine the rest of the time). The color timing is the usual orange-and-teal crap we get out of Hollywood nowadays, which is consistent with the total lack of originality this movie displays in all other ways. About the only good thing going for this movie is some spectacular scenery. Perhaps the director has a real future in nature documentaries. Hey, it isn't the worst movie today. It's just not worth 99 minutes of your time, in my opinion, even if you're a die-hard Cage fan.