#010 - willy's wonderland (2021)
hello and welcome to my weblog. tonight i watched willy’s wonderland (2021).
it’s important to pace yourself, to take little breaks sometimes. case in point - in this movie nic cage is able to clean a dilapidated restaurant in a single night while also defeating a gang of possessed animatronics that have killed hundreds of people before him by using the pomodoro technique. it’s played for laughs but i do think it is the core thesis of the film. and it’s a good point.
i was initially upset that this movie would so slander and besmirch america’s premier entertainers, the rock-afire explosion, and america’s most iconic businessman, charles entertainment cheese, esquire. but i was soon transfixed by the parade of cleaning montages and forgot my grievances. there were some scooby doo-type teens who show up and then immediately die; some of them had names but some i think did not. they felt like an afterthought: second unit footage to get five or ten more minutes of run-time to get us to the 87 minute mark.
nic cage neither speaks nor emotes in this film and barely acknowledges the other (human) characters. he performs actions but they are mostly cleaning and violence. it does seem like a waste to put nic cage in this role, a role that seemingly asks so little of its actor, and i cannot help but wonder if it was meant for a lesser actor and right before filming the production realized that they could get nic (and his brand recognition) on the cheap.