Winning The Lottery With Nicolas Cage #27

My name is Ed and winning the lottery would solve a lot of problems for me right now so in order to do that I have been watching Nicolas Cage films and using them to inspire my selection of lottery numbers. This is definitely a rational thing to do and not some sort of extended cry for help.

This one has David Caruso in it.

Kiss Of Death (1995)

Who knew that David Caruso had ever played another character than ‘the sunglasses policeman’? Here he is ex-con Jimmy, trying to walk the straight and narrow and be a good family man. One illegal favour for his cousin later, he’s in prison and his wife’s dead. I hate Mondays!

The two things Kiss Of Death has going for it are an enjoyably twisty-turny plot and a great cast. Jimmy becomes an informer: but really he’s using the police to play the bad guys off against each other. The district attorney who cuts him the deal (Stanley Tucci) is more interested in getting promoted to judge than actually getting a conviction. The police detective (Samuel L Jackson) blames Jimmy for the unusual injury to his face that means he literally can’t stop crying. Not even all of the crooks are exactly what they seem.

Caruso was nominated for a Razzie, but this just goes to show that the Razzie lot are a bag of spanners. His underplayed performance is exactly what the role requires — everyone he encounters is this big, mannered, creation, so he plays it small, is the quiet everyman.

The biggest performance of them all comes from Cage — superbly ridiculous as Little Junior, the head of this particular gang of crooks, a psychotically macho figure who lives his life by three words: Balls, Attitude, Direction. It is a very, very broad performance but it works because he becomes terrifyingly capable of anything. There’s no such thing as ‘too far’ for the character, so ditto the performance. Little Junior is a big horrible baby, murdering and mutilating on a whim.

Kiss Of Death is fine little thriller — not mind-blowingly original, occasionally hokey, but mainly well told and entirely well cast. You’d have to be asleep not to see the final twist coming a mile off, but by that point you’re rooting hard enough for poor old Jimmy to have something go right for a change that it doesn’t really matter. Would watch again if found while channel surfing at 1am.

THE NUMBERS:

4 — There are 4 car-carrying truck things involved in the car stealing crime at the start of the film. There’s loads of lights on them like they’re the Coca Cola truck, which seems like a bad idea.

5 — Big Junior, Little Junior’s dad, has just 5% of his lung capacity left when he carks it. Asthma is actually a relatively important plot point in this film, at least compared to how important a plot point it is in most films.

8 — Jimmy’s wife Bev is killed at 8am. By driving a car into the path of a truck. Don’t do this, even if you are trying to escape your husband’s dodgy cousin.

20 — At the film’s climax, Jimmy tells his police detective mate to meet him at the strip club in 20 minutes. In quite a ropey bit of tension-building the detective then gets held up in traffic caused by a car accident.

40 — Little Junior does a special sort of exercise which involves lifting a stripper up and down 40 times. That’s not a euphemism, he just lifts her up and down.

47 — Kiss Of Death is a very loose remake of a 1947 film of the same name starring Victor Mature. It was also adapted into a 1958 Western (!) called The Fiend Who Walked the West. There have been 2 UK TV dramas called Kiss Of Death, but they have nothing to do with it.

THE RESULT:

A single number, 5. Why even tease me with this shit, lottery gods?

NEXT TIME ON NICOLAS CAGE:

Leaving Las Vegas. He won his Oscar for it, so that’s got to be a good sign, right?

PREVIOUSLY:

Apparently Medium makes it quite hard to find previous instalments of this so I have made a sort of index thing, here.