I really wanted to like this movie as a huge Nicolas Cage fan, and while I thought he gave a solid performance, its ruined by the terrible script. The atmosphere and soundtrack choices are good too but so many other things just don't work. Some sounds are just way too damn loud(even when I know it was intentional they did not need to be ear-shatteringly loud), there are issues with the editing in spots, Joel Kinneman's acting ranges from believable to what the hell was the director thinking, and the pacing goes from a slow-burn thriller then turns into 15 drawn-out minutes of Nic Cage's character holding different people at gunpoint with his pistol with almost nothing else happening in these scenes. When the scenes are so drawn out, they lose any feeling of tension and instead become annoying. I watched the last 15 minutes to this movie twice to try and understand what was happening and still couldnt. The explanation that Nicolas Cage gives for kidnapping the character was poorly-explained and we get left with so so so many questions when it's all over. But hell, maybe I just missed some important line in the movie or something. And I could look over a lot of that if the movie's ending wasn't so awful. SPOILERS: Nick cage's character is killed at the end by the main character, who then gets surrounded by cops, and I think they were trying to infer that he was going to be held accountable for the murder spree with him holding his hands up at gunpoint. This ending is TERRIBLE for multiple reasons, because one, his wife KNOWS something has gone horribly wrong already when nic cage answered the phone, and two, there were multiple witnesses at the diner who saw what happened that left before it blew up. The bottom line, though, is that the script ruined this movie.
Review of Sympathy for the Devil
