On October 5, the comedy thriller 'Dad from Spetsnaz' is released digitally. We'll tell you why the film, which failed at the global box office, can actually brighten up an evening not only for Nicholas Cage fans.

Nicholas Cage is adept at diverse roles, often united by one thing – almost all of them possess a certain madness. Whether it's the outright crazy role of a lone hero with a blown-off testicle in the fantastic (fantastically talentless) action movie 'Prisoners of the Ghostland' (we wrote about it in ) or the persona of a going-mad-in-an-alternate-reality president of an investment company in the sentimental melodrama 'The Family Man'.

Ivan Starchikov

'Prisoners of the Ghostland': What the New Movie with Crazy Cage Turned Out to Be

In recent years, Nicholas Cage has become an ambassador of trash on screen. Trash of various kinds: sometimes very inventive and beautiful, sometimes raising the question: 'Why did I watch this?'

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Obviously, productivity in the number of works does not correlate with their quality, so even a middling product is comparable to a confident performance. And this is a considerable bonus for those who sometimes bravely endure Cage's movies for Cage's sake, relying on fan enthusiasm. Such a gift can be considered the film 'The Retirement Plan', which received a more comfortable localization title for Russian audiences – 'Dad from Spetsnaz'.

Ashley (Ashley Greene), while helping her husband steal confidential information from a criminal organization, gets into trouble, which also involves her 12-year-old daughter Sarah. Ashley sends her daughter to her father Matt (Nicholas Cage), who doesn't even know he has a granddaughter. A chain of pursuits begins, and the idle pensioner from the Cayman Islands turns out to be a retired hitman who must confront a criminal gang led by boss Donnie (Jackie Earle Haley) and his intellectual assistant Bobo (Ron Perlman).

It's no coincidence that localizers chose a different translation of the title, not a literal one, associatively linking it in the viewer's mind with films of a similar direction. The underlying expectations about the transparency of the plot are later justified by watching the content. 'Dad from Spetsnaz' has no hidden pitfalls. As you imagine a comedy thriller about quiet, unremarkable relatives who turn out to be 'latent Rambos', that's exactly what it is – a niche B-movie, which for Cage, despite being a step back after progressive works into a comfortable acting environment, is still unexpectedly strong for a director who previously mainly produced dog movies and the ridiculously absurd horror film 'The Bite'.

'Dad from Spetsnaz' tries to create a perfect candy with a thriller filling covered in a comedic shell. And sometimes it works quite well: Cage knocks out thugs with a dumbbell, fights them using the laws of physics, and amuses with dark humor, coldly parodying the suffering of a villain with a crushed larynx. At times, the film even gives the impression of a theatrical performance. But the feeling of positive stability is erratic, because after a quality joke, stating the obvious follows, and a tense moment doesn't stick in the mind due to poor focus on the main characters' feelings.

The narrative vector is shifted towards secondary characters. The line of Bobo and Sarah is almost the main one. Watching Ron Perlman's brutal, well-read character is even more interesting than the main hero. In particular, because it is through his branch that analogies with Othello and Iago are drawn. A clearly written parallel runs from the first minutes of the plot and is summed up by the words of the characters themselves, who, together with the viewer, realize the quoting of Shakespeare. Yes, sometimes it's too literal, but that doesn't stop you from being surprised that dramaturgy is even incorporated into a film of this kind.

'Dad from Spetsnaz' is emotionally undercooked in places and plot-wise drawn out, but that doesn't deprive it of its strange charm. It wins because, among films of the same genre with pretensions to a masterpiece or outright passing stories with absurd plot twists, it remains a light movie that doesn't try to reach for the stars and bets on Cage's charisma and Perlman's brutality, which paid off.