Deadfall

The Coppola family is a special clan. I don‘t know if director Christopher Coppola and his brother Nicolas Cage really made the tone of this thriller clear in advance of the shooting, but one thing is for sure, Cage gives one of his most over-the-top hysterical performances of his career. Altogether this movie is quite a failure. The obvious inspiration of film-noir carries the story with the voice-over of the protagonist (Michael Biehn) pushing the movie in a classic direction riding on a wave of heist thrillers à la "what went wrong?", but under inexperienced directing and inconsistent screenplay (co-authored by director Coppola and none other than Nick Vallelonga the co-producer and co-screenwriter plus character in Green Book) seems incredibly naive, forced and all over the place. Then the really real question arises as to what went wrong. Deadfall (humorously nicknamed Dreadfall by contemporary critics) is a movie whose exaggerated ambitions far exceeded the director's creative abilities. Nevertheless, this movie can be viewed with mischievous enjoyment. The icing on the cake includes the scenes in which either the equipment of the sound engineers comes into shot, and when the camera captures the scene in a room at such an angle that the missing ceiling can be seen for a long time.  I've never seen such a botched affair with A-list and hard-working cast. (2020.02.02)