Guilty Pleasure No. 117: Gone in 60 Seconds (dir. by Dominic Sena)

Posted on May 22, 2026 by Arleigh

There is a specific, almost alchemical quality to the late 1990s and early 2000s era of Nicolas Cage as an action star. Before the internet turned every one of his performances into a meme and before his financial troubles led him down the rabbit hole of direct-to-video oddities, Cage was genuinely one of the most exciting and weirdly compelling action heroes on the planet. From The Rock in 1996 to Con Air in 1997 and Face/Off in 1997, he delivered a holy trinity of high-octane insanity that no other actor could have pulled off. By the time the calendar flipped to 2000, Cage was at the peak of his powers, and director Dominic Sena’s Gone in 60 Seconds arrived as both a victory lap and a slight exhale. It is not as unhinged as Face/Off nor as tightly wound as The Rock, but it is a perfect snapshot of its moment: a glossy, MTV-infused car heist flick that smells like gasoline, leather, and late-90s hubris. And while it has plenty of shortcomings, Gone in 60 Seconds has earned its place not in the pantheon of great action cinema, but in that more beloved hall of fame: the Guilty Pleasure.

The plot is as simple as a carburetor. Cage plays Randall “Memphis” Raines, a legendary car thief who has supposedly gone straight, now living a quiet life designing hybrid engines. But when his reckless younger brother Kip, played with sweaty desperation by Giovanni Ribisi, botches a job for a ruthless British gangster named Raymond Calitri (Christopher Eccleston at his sleaziest), Memphis is forced back into the life he left behind. The task is absurdly impossible: steal 50 specific luxury cars in a single weekend, or Calitri will kill Kip. That’s right, fifty cars. In three days. The film never really bothers to explain the logistics of storing or delivering that many vehicles, but that’s not the point. The point is the ride, the revving engines, and the way Cage stares at a 1967 Shelby GT500 named Eleanor like she’s the ghost of a lost lover. That car is the real star, and the film knows it.

Dominic Sena, who previously directed Cage in the underrated road thriller Kalifornia, brings a music video sensibility to the proceedings. Gone in 60 Seconds is drenched in late-90s visual tics: slow-motion shots of hubcaps spinning, golden sunsets glaring off polished chrome, and a soundtrack that alternates between nu-metal grooves and bluesy rock. The editing is fast but not confusing, and the heist sequences have a rhythmic, almost choreographed feel. You never believe for a second that Memphis and his crew—a motley collection of oddballs played by Robert Duvall, Vinnie Jones, and a very underutilized Angelina Jolie—can actually pull off fifty thefts without the entire LAPD catching on. But the film operates on movie logic. Cars are hotwired in seconds, police radio chatter is effortlessly avoided, and every chase defies the laws of physics. It is pure fantasy, and that is exactly why it works as a guilty pleasure.

Now, let’s talk about Cage. In 2000, he was still riding the high of that legendary late-90s run, and Gone in 60 Seconds fits neatly into his brand of action star as tortured romantic. Memphis Raines is not the coked-up lunatic Castor Troy or the shouty Stanley Goodspeed. He is weary, melancholic, and trying to be honorable in a dishonorable profession. Cage plays him with a hangdog sincerity that is surprisingly effective. When he talks to Eleanor, stroking her steering wheel and whispering about how she tests her drivers, he is utterly committed. There is no irony, no winking at the camera. That is the secret to Cage’s enduring appeal in this era: he treats absurd material with the same intensity he would bring to a Shakespeare soliloquy. The action sequences—especially the climactic chase where Eleanor leaps over a drawbridge—showcase Cage’s physicality and willingness to do real stunt work. He sells the danger and the desperation. You believe that this man would risk everything for a car, and that belief makes the film’s silliness palatable.

But let’s be honest about the shortcomings, because Gone in 60 Seconds has plenty. The middle act drags considerably. For a movie about stealing fifty cars, there is a surprising amount of standing around in warehouses and having conversations about “respecting the machine.” Angelina Jolie’s character, Sara, is Memphis’s ex-girlfriend and a fellow thief, but she is given almost nothing to do except look cool in leather and exchange tepid romantic banter with Cage. The chemistry between them is nonexistent. Christopher Eccleston’s Calitri is a one-note villain who likes opera and cruelty, and his final defeat is laughably abrupt. Delroy Lindo plays a dogged detective, but he is so incompetent that he never generates real tension. The film’s central gimmick—the ticking clock of fifty cars in three days—is inconsistently tracked, and by the final act, you have no idea how many cars are left or why it still matters. The dialogue is also gloriously corny. Lines like “Ride or die” and “Respect the car, man” are delivered with such straight faces that they circle back around to being endearing.

And yet, Gone in 60 Seconds earns its status as a guilty pleasure because it understands exactly what it is. This is not a sophisticated heist thriller like Heat or a gritty crime drama. It is a shiny, high-budget B-movie about a man and his car, and it leans into that identity without apology. The final twenty-minute chase sequence is genuinely thrilling, with real cars being destroyed and practical stunts that modern CGI could never replicate. Eleanor getting airborne, landing hard, and somehow still running is a moment of pure cinematic joy. The sound design—the roar of that V8 engine, the screech of tires on asphalt—is visceral and satisfying. And Cage’s performance, even when the script lets him down, holds the whole thing together. He is the anchor that keeps the film from floating away into utter nonsense.

Looking back from today’s perspective, Gone in 60 Seconds is a time capsule of a very specific moment. It captures the tail end of the late-90s obsession with extreme sports, tuner culture, and the idea that cars had souls. It also captures Nicolas Cage at a fascinating crossroads: still an A-list action star, still capable of opening a blockbuster, but already showing the signs of the wonderful weirdness that would later define his career. This film is not his best, not by a long shot, but it is one of his most rewatchable. You put it on when you want to turn your brain off, hear some great engine noises, and watch a sweaty, sincere Nic Cage talk to a Shelby like she is his long-lost sweetheart. That is the definition of a guilty pleasure. It is not good in the traditional sense, but it is fun. And sometimes, fun is enough.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Scenes That I Love: John Woo’s Face/Off

Posted on May 1, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today, the Shattered Lens wishes a happy 77th birthday to director John Woo, the man who did the most to popularize the idea of the slo mo of doom!

Today’s scene that I love comes from Woo’s 1997 film, Face/Off. In this scene, Nicolas Cage and John Travolta purse each other in speedboats. The action is wonderfully over-the-top. Throughout this film, Cage and Travolta both do what they do best in this scene and so does John Woo.

Review: 8mm (dir. by Joel Schumacher)

Posted on April 11, 2026 by Arleigh

“Because he could!” — Daniel Longdale

Joel Schumacher’s 8MM (1999) uncoils like a reel of forbidden footage you shouldn’t have found, pulling a buttoned-up private eye into the rancid shadows of underground smut peddlers and whispers of snuff films that may or may not exist. It’s a late-’90s thriller smack in the wake of Se7en and Kiss the Girls, starring Nicolas Cage as Tom Welles, a Harrisburg family man whose crisp suits and steady hands belie the unraveling ahead. Hired by a steel magnate’s widow to verify an 8mm tape depicting a girl’s torture-murder, Welles tumbles down a rabbit hole of L.A. peep shows and New York meatpacking sleaze, his moral compass spinning as the line between fantasy and atrocity blurs. Schumacher crafts a narrative engine that hums with procedural grit, doling out dread in measured doses while mirroring the protagonist’s corrosion, though it occasionally stumbles in its heavier-handed turns.

The setup hooks with surgical efficiency, painting Welles as everydad detective: he buries bodies for a living, kisses his infant daughter goodbye, and screens the tape in a vault-like study that feels like a confessional. Myra Carter’s Mrs. Christian trembles with decorous horror as the projector whirs to life, bathing the room in jaundiced flicker; the footage—grainy, handheld, a pleading teen bound for “Machine’s” blade—lands like a gut punch without lingering on gore. Lawyer Longdale (Anthony Heald, all patrician slime) waves it off as staged porn, but Welles digs anyway, tracing victim Mary Ann Mathews through missing-persons archives to her runaway dreams in Hollywood. Paired with Max California (Joaquin Phoenix), a Sunset Strip tape jockey with pawn-shop cynicism and a Zipperhead tee, they prowl fetish dens where vendors hawk needle-play loops and dismiss snuff as urban legend. Schumacher’s lens, via Robert Elswit, turns these dives into feverish grottos—neon strobes slicing steam, racks of VHS promising the forbidden—building unease through denial upon denial.

That mounting frustration propels the first hour’s finest stretches, a slow immersion where Welles’s calls home grow terse, his wife’s concern (Catherine Keener, quietly anchoring) a lifeline fraying in crosscuts. Max’s street-rat patter—”Snuff? Ain’t no such thing as snuff, man”—leavens the rot without undercutting it, Phoenix layering vulnerability beneath the snark that makes his arc genuinely affecting. Schumacher parcels revelations like a fuse burning short: a Florida trailer confirms Mary Ann’s vanishing, a porn mag scout nods toward “real death” commissions, and suddenly they’re in New York, knocking on Dino Velvet’s door. Peter Stormare vamps as the mulleted auteur of extremity, his studio a cathedral of spotlit chains where Machine (masked, hulking) performs for hidden lenses. The confrontation there explodes into sudden violence and betrayal, shattering assumptions about the tape’s origins and thrusting Welles into a desperate fight for survival, with devastating losses that harden his path forward.

This mid-film rupture peels back layers of the underworld’s machinery, revealing how far some will go to sate forbidden appetites—no vast conspiracy, just raw opportunism turning fantasy lethal. Chaos erupts in a brutal showdown that catapults Welles into lone-wolf payback, though the script’s mechanics creak here, tipping from investigation to vengeance saga with less finesse than its buildup promises. He tracks leads back to L.A., confronting scout Eddie Poole (James Gandolfini) in a derelict factory, beating out confessions amid rusted girders, then facing Machine—unmasked as unassuming accountant George Higgins (Chris Bauer), who shrugs, “I like it”—in a rain-slicked graveyard melee. Schumacher stages the violence as visceral toll, not catharsis: fists land with bone-crunching thuds, blood sprays real, and Welles emerges hollowed, sobbing in his wife’s arms over the unerasable stain. It’s raw consequence over triumph, indicting the watcher as much as the watched.

Cage shoulders the load masterfully, dialing back his manic energy for a portrait of competence curdling into obsession—hesitant stares post-tape, fists unclenching at home, exploding only when the dam breaks. It’s restrained Cage at his peak, the fury earned through incremental fracture, though some beats flirt with overemphasis. Phoenix shines brighter still, turning Max from sidekick gag into soulful foil; his death resonates because Joaquin sells the bravado as fragile armor. Stormare’s Dino struts operatic depravity, a Bond villain in wifebeater, while Gandolfini’s Poole simmers regretful everyman heft—pre-Sopranos groundwork for Tony’s shadows. Heald’s Longdale drips WASP entitlement, and bits like Norman Reedus’s twitchy dealer add lived-in texture. Schumacher elicits extremes without cartooning them, populating the underworld with deviants who feel plausibly human, not pulp cutouts.

Visually, 8MM thrums with Schumacher’s maximalist pulse tamed to noir grit: Elswit’s shadows swallow faces in peep booths’ crimson haze, the snuff reel’s jitter evokes cursed artifacts, and the loft showdown’s spotlights carve brutality like Bosch hellscapes. Mychael Danna’s score slithers—piano sparsity for Welles’s drift, synth throbs for dives—capped by Aphex Twin’s “Come to Daddy” warping a raid into glitch-rage frenzy. Production design nails the era’s analog underbelly: dog-eared tape boxes, industrial decay standing in for L.A. (shot cheap in Florida), all evoking a pre-digital void where evil hides on celluloid. The snuff aesthetic probes voyeurism smartly—we glimpse pleas and steel without exploitation, questioning our gaze alongside Welles’s, though the film’s flirtation with seediness risks tipping into the very prurience it critiques.

Andrew Kevin Walker’s script (fresh off Se7en) structures as moral diptych: procedural probe yields to vigilante spasm, bookended by domestic anchors that underscore the cost. No tidy psychologizing redeems the killers—Higgins kills because appetite wills it, Poole for “business,” others for greed—exposing evil’s flat banality over tortured backstories. The widow’s suicide post-truth, Mary Ann’s mom’s grateful note (“You cared enough to try”), and Welles’s scarred homecoming deny closure; vengeance hardens more than heals, bodies burned sans parade of justice. It’s a gut-punch thesis on film’s limits: some horrors defy capture, watching them unmakes the witness. Schumacher, slumming post-Batman gloss, revels in the ugly, though pacing drags early in porn prowls and the revenge rampage strains credulity.

Yet for all its stumbles—script contrivances like convenient turns, a third act veering punchy over precise—8MM endures as underrated descent, a thriller that stares unblinking into appetite’s void. Cage and Phoenix elevate genre tropes, Schumacher’s design makes depravity stick, and the core query lingers: does filming evil make it real, or us complicit? Flaws aside, it hums with the era’s dark electricity, a flawed reel worth unspooling for its unflinching grind.

Lisa Marie’s Way Too Early Oscar Predictions For March

Posted on March 15, 2026 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Now that the awards for the best of 2025 have been handed out, it’s time to think about what might be nominated next year!

Below are my first set of Oscar predictions for 2026! What am I basing these predictions on? Nothing but instinct, wild guesses, and hopeful thinking. Take them with a grain of salt. If nothing else, we’ll look back on these a year from now and we’ll laugh. Or, we’ll be amazed at my cognitive abilities.

Best Picture

Digger

Disclosure Day

Dune Part Three

I Play Rocky

The Invite

Mother Mary

The Odyssey

Queen At Sea

The Social Reckoning

Wild Horse Nine

Best Director

Lance Hammer for Queen At Sea

Martin McDonagh for Wild Horse Nine

Christopher Nolan for The Odyssey

Steven Spielberg for Disclosure Day

Denis Villeneuve for Dune Part Three

Best Actor

Nicolas Cage in Madden

Timothee Chalamet in Dune Part Three

Tom Cruise in Digger

Anthony Ippolito in I Play Rocky

John Malkovivh in Wild Hose Nine

Best Actress

Juliette Binoche in Queen At Sea

Emily Blunt in Disclosure Day

Isabelle Huppert in The Blood Countess

Mikey Madison in The Social Reckoning

Anya Taylor-Joy in Joni Mitchell

Best Supporting Actor

Tom Courtenay in Queen At Sea

Willem DaFoe in Werewulf

Stephan James in I Play Rocky

Edward Norton in The Invite

Jeremy Strong in The Social Reckoning

Best Supporting Actress

Anna Calder-Marshall in Queen At Sea

Michaela Coel in Mother Mary

Penelope Cruz in The Invite

AnnaSophia Robb in I Play Rocky

Meryl Streep in Joni Mitchell

Happy Birthday, Nicolas Cage! 🎉🎂

Posted on January 7, 2026 by Bradley Crain

Today is Nicolas Cage’s 62nd birthday. Join me and celebrate by watching this incredible clip from my favorite film of 2021, PIG! It’s currently streaming on Netflix!

Scenes that I Love: The Iguanas On The Coffee Tables From Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Posted on December 29, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Ever since Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans was first released in 2009, people have debated the symbolism of the iguanas on the coffee table. Are they just a sign that Nicolas Cage’s bad lieutenant is totally high or do they have a deeper meaning? Myself, I’m not even going to try to guess. All I know is that the lieutenant eventually came to appreciate their presence.

Horror Film Review: Willy’s Wonderland (dir by Kevin Lewis)

Posted on October 13, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

2021’s Willy’s Wonderland takes place in an dilapidated restaurant.

Back in the day, Willy’s Wonderland was the ideal place to go if you were young and celebrating your birthday. The animatronic mascots would sing “Happy birthday” and maybe meet your parents. Willy Weasel, Arty Alligator, Cammy Chameleon, Ozzie Ostrich, Tito Turtle, Knighty Knight, Gus Gorilla, and Siren Sara promised fun and cheesy entertainment to anyone looking for a nice family meal!

Unfortunately, people stopped going to Willy’s once it was discovered that the owner was a serial killer. Jerry Robert Willis (Grant Cramer) and his seven friends were cannibals who regularly sacrificed families. Eventually, the police caught up to him but, even under new ownership, no one wanted to eat at Willy’s. There were rumors that Willis and his friends had transferred their souls into the animatronic figures but surely, that could not have been true!

Right?

Nicolas Cage plays a man with no name. When his car breaks down, the local mechanic agrees to fix the car if the man agrees to spend the night as the janitor at Willy’s. Apparently, it’s been a struggle to keep a night janitor at the place. People find the location to be creepy and, of course, the animatronic mascots keep killing anyone dumb enough to try to mop the floors. Cage’s man with no name silently agrees. Everything that Cage does, he does without a word. This is one of the rare films where Nicolas Cage, usually a champion talker, says absolutely nothing.

Now, I should mention that there actually is a plot to Willy’s Wonderland. Liv (Emily Tosta) and her friends are trying to burn the place down because, years ago, Liv’s parents were murdered by the mascots. Unfortunately, Liv and her friends aren’t that smart and they end up trapped in Willy’s Wonderland. The majority of them quickly fall victim to the mascots. The deaths are appropriately gruesome, though tinged with the dark humor that would come from essentially being killed by a knock-off version of Chuck E. Cheese.

But really, the plot isn’t important. This film is entirely about Nicolas Cage, playing a man with no name. Cage takes the janitorial job and, over the course of the night, he battles the mascots. At the same time, he also makes it a point to continue to do his job. Besieged or not, he agreed to clean the place up. He takes his breaks and plays pinball exactly as scheduled, even if that means abandoning Liv and her friends. Normally, you might think that this would be bad behavior on the part of Cage’s character. Abandoning someone in the middle of a battle is not usually encouraged. But Liv and her friends are very annoying. Cage is ultimately the hero by default. Yes, he’s fighting and killing the mascots but he’s really only doing it because they’re getting in his way while he’s trying to do his job. The fact that he helps out Liv is largely coincidental.

Willy’s Wonderland proves that Cage doesn’t need a lot of lines to be the center of a film. Even without speaking, he’s such a wonderfully eccentric presence that you can’t help but watch him and cheer him on. Admittedly, Willy’s Wonderland is never that scary, though the “Happy Birthday” song is definitely creepy. The mascots are a bit too cartoonish to be truly frightening. But, if the film doesn’t really work as a horror film, it does work as an adrenaline-fueled Cage match. And that’s nearly as good.

Live Tweet Alert – #MondayMuggers present WILLY’S WONDERLAND (2021), starring Nicolas Cage!

Posted on July 14, 2025 by Bradley Crain

Every Monday night at 9:00 Central Time, my wife Sierra and I host a “Live Movie Tweet” event on X using the hashtag #MondayMuggers. We rotate movie picks each week, and our tastes are quite different. We’re actually hitting a 3-year milestone with #MondayMuggers, which had its premiere on July 11th, 2022. Tonight, Monday, July 14th, we’re excited to present WILLY’S WONDERLAND (2021), starring Nicolas Cage, Emily Tosta, Beth Grant, and Ric Reitz.

The plot: A quiet drifter is tricked into a janitorial job at the now condemned Willy’s Wonderland. The mundane tasks suddenly become an all-out fight for survival against wave after wave of demonic animatronics. Fists fly, kicks land, titans clash — and only one side will make it out alive.

So, if you think you might enjoy watching Nicolas Cage take on “demonic animatronics,” then there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy this movie. Join us for the 3-year anniversary celebration of #MondayMuggers and watch WILLY’S WONDERLAND. It’s on Amazon Prime! I’ve included the trailer below:

Brad’s “Scene of the Day” – Alessandro Nivola and Nicolas Cage in FACE/OFF (1997)!

Posted on June 28, 2025 by Bradley Crain

Alessandro Nivola has some good credits in movies like MANSFIELD PARK (1999), AMERICAN HUSTLE (2013), and THE BRUTALIST (2024), but he’ll always be special to me as Pollux Troy, the younger brother of Nicolas Cage’s Castor Troy, in John Woo’s most awesome American film FACE/OFF!

In celebration of Nivola’s 53rd birthday, enjoy this little taste of late-90’s coolness (the link can only be watched on YOUTUBE, and it’s worth it):

The Films of 2025: The Surfer (dir by Lorcan Finnegan)

Posted on June 15, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Surfer (Nicolas Cage) is an American who has returned to the Australian beach where his dad used to surf. He wants to buy a home overlooking the ocean. Even more importantly, he wants to surf with his teenage son (Finn Little). As the Surfer and his son walk towards the water, they are confronted by three men. The leader of the men goes by the name of Pitbull (Alexander Bertrand).

“Don’t live here,” Pitbull says, “don’t surf here.”

The Surfer assures Pitbull that his son is an amazing surfer. (The Surfer’s son looks embarrassed.)

“Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” Pitbull replies.

Pitbull is a member of a cult of local surfers, all of whom follow Scally (Julian McMahon), a self-appointed guru who recites his rules with a ruthless but charismatic intensity. Scally brands his followers, burning their flesh in a ritual to announce that they are now a part of his family. “Before you can surf, you must suffer,” Scally says.

Now, to be honest, I would just go to a different beach. I’m not a surfer. I’m not even that much of a swimmer. I do, however, enjoy laying out on a nice beach or by a big swimming pool. One thing that I’ve learned is that, when the cult arrives, you leave. Seriously, there’s always somewhere better to go. Any place that does not have a cult will be infinitely better than a place that does.

The Surfer’s son agrees with me and suggests just going to another beach but that’s not an option for the Surfer. The Surfer is obsessed with Scally’s beach and he’s determined to surf it. It was on that beach where the Surfer made his best childhood memories. It was on that beach where his father died. The Surfer sends his son back home and then the Surfer literally moves into his Lexus. He sleeps in the parking lot and he keeps an obsessive eye on the beach.

People come and go. The Surfer meets the Bum (Nic Cassim), who claims that Scally is responsible for the death of both his dog and his son. A local cop comes by and is quickly revealed to be a member of Scally’s cult. The Surfer become more and more disheveled. He loses his money. He loses his car. He runs into his real estate agent (Rahel Romahn) but the agent says that he’s never seen the Surfer before. The Surfer starts to hallucinate and can no longer keep straight who is who. What at first seemed like an intense midlife crisis and a desire to reclaim one’s youth starts to seem like something much more troubling and potentially psychotic. Everyone tells The Surfer to leave. Everyone tells him that he’s never going to get his house and he’s never going to surfer the beach. But, like the Bum, the Surfer is a man obsessed.

The Surfer is an intriguing film. At first, it seems like it’s going to be another Nicolas Cage revenge film. Then, it becomes a surreal head trip, one that leaves you wondering just who exactly Cage’s surfer actually is. Unfortunately, the film loses it’s way during its final third and instead becomes a rather mundane thriller. That said, the cinematography is gorgeous and, if you’re a fan of Cage’s unique style (as I am), this film allows him a chance to get totally unhinged. I wish the film had stuck with its surreal implications rather than chickening out during the final third but still, The Surfer and Nicolas Cage held my interest.