Movie Review - Deadfall

Deadfall first came to my attention when I saw a clip on YouTube called Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit. I had no idea what the movie was about. I hoped it would be one of those “so bad it’s good” movies. I’d watch it for Cage’s hilarious over-acting and anything else the movie provided me would be a bonus. Little did I know that Cage’s overacting would be pretty much the only thing worth watching.

"They're in my eyes!"

There have been a handful of movies I’ve watched because I knew Nic Cage would be his usual hammy self, and that’s all I was expecting out of this movie. Sometimes, I am rewarded with a demented masterpiece like Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Sometimes I’m punished with a piece of shit like Deadfall. The difference? Werner Herzog directed Bad Lieutenant. Something called Christopher Coppola directed Deadfall.

Which guy do you want directing your movie?

Christopher Coppola is Nicolas Cage’s brother (!) and Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew. When you’ve got showbiz connections like that; you can get some pretty big names to appear in your horrible movie. Check out the list of actors that appear in Deadfall: Michael Biehn, Nicolas Cage, James Coburn, Peter Fonda, Charlie Sheen, and Talia Shire.

In Deadfall, Biehn stars as a con-man who accidentally kills his father (James Coburn) during a grift gone wrong and ends up leaving town to work for his uncle. His uncle is his father’s twin brother, thus allowing Coburn to play both roles. Lucky guy.

The uncle is also in the con-game (because twin brothers always just so happen to work in the same industry), and pretty soon, they’re involved in a con that’s going to wind up in them all getting rich and blah blah blah, same thing that’s happened in a million other con job movies that have been made a million times better.

For some reason, Coppola decided Biehn should do a voice-over for this movie, and for some reason, Biehn decided to do the voice-over in the most boring voice imaginable. Seriously. The guy sounded like he came into a recording studio six months after he was done filming this piece of shit and decided to just be as dull as possible when recording the track. Ben Stein ain’t got shit on Michael Biehn in Deadfall.

Bueller?

I’ve enjoyed Biehn in movies before. He’s provided fun supporting turns in The Terminator, Tombstone and The Rock, so I figured he was a good actor. Turns out, he’s really not. I guess working with a hack director like Coppola brings out the worst in Biehn, because the guy is a complete cipher in Deadfall. He takes himself way too seriously and it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that all of his scenes were done in the first take. It seems like Coppola just said “Hey, no need to do a second take there, Mike. We’ve got what we’re looking for. Head on back to your trailer and enjoy a Mr. Pibb.”

Tombstone is so awesome.

I must usually take a movie’s score for granted, because Deadfall’s was so horrible that I couldn’t help but be distracted by it. Most movies that have decent budgets and are engineered by professionals have a score that is competent at the very least. A movie’s score should either be so unobtrusive that you just don’t notice it, or it should be so good that you go “Holy shit! What a score! I can’t imagine the movie without the music I just heard!” Deadfall’s score is obnoxiously bad. It sounds like it was recorded in a middle school gym with the middle school band performing the music. It adds no tension to the proceedings.

Here’s how tone deaf Deadfall is. At one point, Biehn challenges a hustler played by Charlie Sheen (in an extended cameo) to a game of billiards for a thousand dollars a point. Not pool, billiards. The scene is supposed to feel really tense and high stakes, but since approximately 14 people on earth know the rules to billiards, it’s a complete dud. BILLIARDS!

Nice jacket.

The only fun to be had from Deadfall is the aforementioned Messrs Cage and Coburn. Cage is delightfully over the top and seems to realize that he’s acting in a complete piece of crap. He wears terrible sunglasses, has a terrible spray tan, and has an even more terrible toupee. His wardrobe is straight out of Scarface if Al Pacino’s character had even worse taste. Coburn provides the emotional center (or at least as much of an emotional center as can be had for such a terrible movie), and his dye job for the character of Biehn’s father is truly a marvel to behold.

It's worse than you thought, isn't it?

I’ve watched several movies out of morbid curiosity and Deadfall is far from the worst. The direction is flat, the score is god-awful, and the performances are mostly terrible. It’s not offensively bad, just boring. The last third of the movie is especially a slog because Cage’s character gets killed off by having his face shoved in a deep fryer. Now that I think about it, that’s kind of the perfect metaphor for Deadfall.