Outcast (2014)
A mysterious warrior teams up with the daughter and son of a deposed Chinese Emperor to defeat their cruel brother, who seeks their deaths.
Watch Trailer
Cast
Similar titles
Reviews
Surprisingly incoherent and boring
Simply Perfect
Just perfect...
It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film
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
It was actually fun to watch. Nicolas cage is and always has been awful. His squinty eye acting trying to portray someone missing an eye made me LOL. He is just awful. Like super awful. Including his bad accent. He is not even really a main character. Hayden was great! I would suggest it as an easy to watch action movie...just ignore the bad actor.
I have watched a LOT of really bad movies, and this isn't anywhere near the bottom of the barrel. In fact, it's kind of enjoyable. The bad guy is sufficiently bad that we he drives the story and justifies our anger. He has just enough complexity that he escapes being one- dimensional. Hayden Christensen is acceptable as basically the fallen hero, and Nicholas Cage is, well, a little off the wall.Some people complain about the action, and the first sequence is not that great. But the later action scenes are decent, and the last sword- fight is pretty good.Some of the story is sort of sketched in instead of really told in depth, but it's not inconsistent or riddled with plot holes. What story there is moves along at a good pace.
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.