What will Nicolas Cage’s retirement plan be? There is perhaps no actor who loves his work more than the adventurous nouveau shaman, who will pump out film after film with barely any time to breathe. Clearing a staggering seven films released widely in 2023 (if one is to include the three hours of work on a hideous Superman cameo in The Flash), it’s clear that Cage’s prolific and dedicated work ethic shows no sign of fatigue as he approaches his golden years. Now 59, and with his final 2023 release, The Retirement Plan, he deemed it time to enter the ‘geriaction’ genre – where action stars of years gone by blow off the cobwebs, blow away the villains’ estimations, and blow up their heads in quick succession. What’s not to get excited about here? The lifeless performances and limp action beats of The Expendables of this world have long coasted by on the goodwill of their fans, so the triumphant entrance of Nicolas Cage into this sub-genre should offer a rollicking good time, so it’s such a pity that not a single moment of it is.
The lethargic plot kicks off when a financially-ruined couple (Twilight’s Ashley Greene and Jordan Johnson-Hinds), try to lift a mysterious hard drive from a notorious gangster (Jackie Earle Hayley) – with mixed results. On the run and with marks on their heads, they quickly fly their eleven year old daughter Sarah (Thalia Campbell), to stay with her estranged grandad Matt (Cage), in the Cayman Islands. Matt is a drunk, cursing perpetually in front of his pride and joy’s pride and joy, and without a single scrap of food to offer her upon her arrival. What poor Sarah doesn’t know is that she’s the unwitting smuggler for this precious hard drive, and a host of goons (led by a game Ron Perlman), and government agents soon descend upon her, Matt and his little pissed-up paradise. On the flipside, what the bad guys don’t know is that Pee-Paw Matt has a particular set of skills that can make him a nightmare for people like them., and sun-baked carnage ensues.
There’s a relatively low bar for this sort of material, and many viewers will be attracted to it just for the location work, especially as the winter months draw in – it can be nice to just bask in some artificial sunlight, even if it’s just coming from your TV. Cage has indeed earned a sunny holiday since his last few films have seen him wandering round wintery Toronto in Dream Scenario, and the harsh wilderness of Montana in Butcher’s Crossing. He’s been quoted as saying that he signed on for the movie after his friend Ron Perlman did, and since this film’s existence hinges on the fact that two old buddies got to sip margaritas and have a laugh after work, one has to be charitable to it to some degree. Its production also coincided with the sad passing of Nicolas Cage’s mother, so it’s also nice to assume he had a friend close by when receiving the news.
The Retirement Plan contains no less than three icons of grown-up comic-book cinema.
Perlman is the film’s highlight – playing a lumbering gangster who knows his literature, and the scenes where he and Thalia Campbell discuss Dickens and Shakespeare when she’s trying to do her homework while being kidnapped are the film’s best. There seems to be a richer, more engaging, and even funnier movie hiding in the sidelines with them, so it’s amazing that nothing else works. For a film billed as a jaunty action comedy it’s eerily mirth-free, with not a single laugh being provoked by any quip or ridiculous death.
The film appears to have been given a comic-book edge in post-production as every new character is introduced with a crack of the whip, a cheesy freeze-frame, and a splash of colour with their name emblazoned onto the screen. The Retirement Plan contains no less than three icons of grown-up comic-book cinema (Earle Haley portrayed the best Rorschach imaginable in Watchmen, Perlman is still best-known for Hellboy, and Cage turned in the best performance in Kick-Ass as Big Daddy), yet none of that spirit translates into a series of deadening action sequences. Cage and Ghostbusters fan favourite Ernie Hudson grapple with henchmen with all the ferocity of changing a duvet cover, amid portentous conversations between the villains who say that this violent grandad is “the man who trained Rambo”.
It must also be said that Cage is only nine months older than his contemporary Keanu Reeves, who just turned in the most high-octane performance of his career in John Wick: Chapter 4, fully convincing as an assassin who is as dangerous as he is getting on. There’s not one moment in The Retirement Plan where you believe that Cage’s Matt is one of the world’s most lethal human beings, as the choreography is so poor and staid that the stuntmen don’t look like they’re doing anything other than tripping over. It’s the type of attitude to action that a sedentary Steven Seagal might take, relying on the bark of the dialogue to do all the heavy lifting while the bite of the action remains totally toothless. Mix all that with a tertiary plotline involving the CIA (headed up by a seriously miscast Joel David Moore), and you’ve got a nice recipe for homemade NyQuil.
By the merciful end of The Retirement Plan it becomes apparent that this is Nicolas Cage’s version of kicking back for some R&R, with no plans to actually retire any time soon. It’s as low effort a movie as he’s ever done, and one can only hope he took it on as an excuse to make another film like Mandy or Pig that will give him something worthwhile to chew on. Despite the admittedly sombre circumstances surrounding its production, it’s hard to give something to a film that offers so little in the first place.
The Retirement Plan is out now on Digital Platforms (Signature Entertainment)
