The 2016 Neo-Noir Dog Eat Dog is a Tough, Nasty Little Sleeper With Fine Work from Paul Schrader, Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe
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My expectations for Nicolas Cage vehicles from the wilderness years are so low that I am legitimately surprised and thankful if one of his movies from this period has anything going for it.
I don’t expect Cage movies from the terrible teen years to be good, mind you. I don’t expect anything from them beyond a certain bleary professionalism.
So I was legitimately gob-smacked to find myself enjoying 2016’s Dog Eat Dog, an adaptation of an Edward Bunker novel directed by Paul Schrader that re-teams the legendary writer and director with Willem Dafoe, who unforgettably played the other John Carpenter in Schrader’s Auto Focus.
In Auto Focus Dafoe got inside the skin and clammy flesh of a deranged pervert who was corrupt and sick on a molecular level. He’s just about the single most disgusting human being in the history of film.
That makes it all the more surprising and weirdly impressive that in Dog Eat Dog Dafoe plays a lunatic so deeply unwell that he makes his character in Auto Focus seem like Mr. Rogers leading a Boy Scout troop by comparison.
Edward Bunker is know for two things: appearing in Resevoir Dogs and doing time in the slammer for bank robbery, drug dealing, extortion, armed robbery, and forgery.
Bunker’s long criminal history inform every hardboiled novel and screenplay he wrote. If Dog Eat Dog feels authentic in its depiction of the criminal underworld and the complicated emotions of life on the wrong side of the law it’s probably because Bunker knows this world firsthand and wrote about it with innate conviction.
For the three villains/ex-cons at the center of this nasty nugget—Willem Dafoe’s Mad Dog, Christopher Matthew Cook’s Diesel and Nicolas Cage’s Troy—prison is so much more than a place where they spent some of the worst years of their lives.
Prison defines them. It took what was already bad about them and made it far worse. They may have left prison but prison will never leave them.
Dog Eat Dog opens with a set-piece that establishes a tone of unrelenting nastiness the film maintains throughout. In it Dafoe’s desperate ex-convict, who is also a heroin and cocaine addict seeks shelter from life’s cruelty in the home of an overweight single mother he had a sexual relationship with at some point.
The woman is understandably less than enthused to see Mad Dog pop back up in her life but is willing to let him stay the night until she sees that he’s been using the family computer for underage teen porn.
The apoplectic woman is about to throw Mad Dog out but before she can he stabs her to death and then gets a gun and murders her horrified daughter to the ironic backdrop of a cheerful hillbilly ditty.
This scene establishes the movie’s comically grim and grimly comic tone and also the desperation, insanity and pure evil of Dafoe’s character.
Mad Dog’s default fight or flight reflex is to start killing people. When he gets nervous corpses start piling up. That makes him a dangerous person to have on your side but Troy is a desperate man without much in the way of options.
When Dog Eat Dog opens Troy has just gotten out of the Big House after an extended stay. On the outside he indulges his many voices and reunites with Mad Dog and Diesel and immediately returns to his old life of committing felonies with a pair of sociopaths.
Acting opposite Dafoe at his sleaziest brings out the best in Cage, as does working with Schrader, who does double-duty in his first-ever acting role as Grecco The Greek, a mobster who works with the terrible trio.
According to IMDB, Schrader stepped into the role after unsuccessfully trying to cast Michael Wincott, Michael Douglas, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Nick Nolte, Christopher Walken, Jeff Goldblum and Rupert Everett in the part.
Cage delivers a bold, theatrical performance as the leader and idea man of a criminal triumvirate that’s like a family in the same sense that the folks who hung around with Charles Manson were a family.
Christopher Matthew Cook rounds out the trio as a big bruiser who’s as smart as he is volatile. He’s never more than a few moments from erupting into violence.
Cage, Dafoe and Cook have a very lived-in chemistry. It’s very easy to believe that these awful men have known each other forever and have only moved further and further away from redemption with time.
Dog Eat Dog is full of wonderful little character moments that don’t move the plot forward or serve a narrative function but tell us a great deal about who these characters are and where they’ve been.
In it, Mad Dog, Troy and Diesel are celebrating a successful crime at a rundown casino and Mad Dog takes off his shoe so that he can feel the carpet under him. This leads to an achingly sad and revealing little monologue about the piss and cum-covered concrete of prison and how it makes something as banal as the cheap carpet on a casino floor feel like the most luxurious thing in the world.
Prison molded and shaped and destroyed the anti-heroes. It’s what they hate and fear the most but from the moment they got out they began doing exactly the kinds of things that will get them thrown back in for good.
Mad Dog, Troy and Diesel are all facing down third strikes so the stakes for them couldn’t be higher. It’s money, success and a big score that’ll allow them to retire or suicide by cop. There’s no in-between.
When the trio agree to kidnap a baby for ransom things go from bad to worse. The accident prone crooks accidentally end up killing the man who was going to pay the ransom and soon find themselves wanted men with no way out.
Dog Eat Dog starts out grim and grows bleaker as it proceeds. It doesn’t have likable or sympathetic characters. Its anti-heroes are murderous scum of earth it’s impossible to root for but they are fascinating in their unrelenting scumminess.
Schrader has written a tough and engaging little Neo-Noir that features one of Cage’s performances from this period though the world, alas, did not seem to notice or care.
Thankfully Cage and Shrader have both enjoyed comebacks over the past couple of years so hopefully the curious will be moved to check out this over-achieving little sleeper.
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