8) Rage
Nicolas Cage has made some incredibly bad movies in his lifetime, but Rage takes the cake. Hideously ugly, boring, incoherent and riddled with cliches, it’s certainly the most grueling of his films to sit through. Rage will never be one of those bargain-bin flicks occasionally pulled out for another watch on the grounds that it’s “so bad it’s good.” No, instead, this brain-dead affair is so soul-crushingly bad it makes you hope no one involved with it ever makes another movie.
Cage plays a former criminal who returns to the fold in hopes of getting revenge after his teenage daughter is abducted and shot through the head by unknown evildoers. Instead of turning another winkingly outrageous performance, the unpredictable actor makes the unfortunate call to play this one straight, which makes Rage even more of a punishing slog than it needed to be. As Cage wades through hackneyed dialogue and dull action sequences, there’s nary a minute where he betrays any kind of dramatic talent.
Everything in Rage sucks. There’s no other way to put it. Whatever kind of game Cage is playing, I’m out. This latest offense against good taste clinched it for me – I will never see another movie led by the actor.