Movie Haiku & Review: Matchstick Men (2003)

(Image from movieberry.com)

Nicholas Cage cons;
Daughter and protégé, too.
Dangerously fun.

~

I watched this movie this morning on tv, because it happened to be playing on USA Network*. I remember seeing the trailer when it was in theaters and I was vaguely interested in seeing this. Today I watched Matchstick Men for the first time, and I enjoyed it enough to not mind watching it again. During the commercial breaks I'd channel surf and ended up missing small chunks of the movie in addition to whatever the network cut out for cable tv.

The plot isn't anything too complicated: Nicholas Cage is Roy, a not con man but a con ARTIST, who lives a neurotic, lonely life and works with protégé Frank (Sam Rockwell) and working their mark Chuck (Bruce McGill) when his teenage daughter (Alison Lohman) unexpectedly shows up. Cage is fun and not too campy/crazy/lacking irony like he's been for the last few years in the his last few movies **. Lohman is energetic, earnest, and eager to please Cage's character; plays a pretty convincing 14-year-old (she was 24 when the movie came out). Rockwell is solid, balances Cage well, and in retrospect his character is a little unnerving but in a good way. It's not a showy or glamorous film, but it's still solid and has a good balance of of scenes with levity and intensity. It's by Ridley Scott, but doesn't really feel like it's BY RIDLEY SCOTT, DIRECTOR OF "GLADIATOR". I don't mean that in the perjorative sense, it's just that it has a smaller, low-key feel, and the characters are modeled after real people who are imperfect and not always heroic or likeable. It's a serviceable film that doesn't demand too much of the viewer and would be fun to watch over and over-- or until you've had your fill of neurotic Mr. Cage.


*I think that waking up on Saturday mornings to watch TV is so deeply ingrained in me that, even if there's nothing particularly interesting on, I'll still end up watching an hour of whatever's on at that time. Hence, how I ended up watching this movie; I enjoyed it but wouldn't have seen it in any other situation.

** But as terrible as it looks and probably is, I still kind of want to see "Season of the Witch". Ron Perlman is in it (a plus), and Christopher Lee has some sick prosthetic makeup (double plus). I won't shell out the money to see it in theaters, but I'm sure it'll be fun to watch it with a gaggle of friends (...because my friends are geese?) when its comes out on DVD.