Directed by Yuval Adler from a screenplay by Luke Paradise, Sympathy for the Devil plays like a cut-rate Collateral, except with the unfortunate cabbie at the center of Michael Mann’s film swapped out with a hostage driver named David (Joel Kinnaman). As soon as David, an expectant father, pulls into the parking garage of the hospital where his wife is about to give birth, Nicolas Cage’s gangster character hops into the backseat and holds him at gunpoint, forcing him to drive away. From there, Sympathy for the Devil verges on plotlessness as it skates through such timeworn scenarios for the crime movie as being pulled over by a cop or stopping off at a diner, never managing an ounce of tension or mystery along the way.
Cage’s character, credited only as the Passenger, regales David with a litany of self-conscious musings that are all over movies of this one’s ilk—all bonehead remarks about specific turns of phrase or human behavior. The Passenger won’t divulge his true destination, but that’s plainly less relevant to the film than whatever screenwriterly exchanges might happen on the way there. David fields a few frantic mid-labor phone calls from his wife, but his family feels like a nonentity. “Why would you assume you’ll ever go home again?” the Passenger asks David at one point, as though giving voice to the film’s lack of tension, because as David travels farther and farther from the hospital, there’s never a sense that he’s ever coming back.
But if ever an actor could shoulder the entire burden of a low-rent crime thriller like this one, it’s Cage. With his shock of maroon hair and crazed bid at a Boston accent, the actor seethes and hisses at every turn. His performance is a repository weirdness and wild emotion, as in a monologue about a childhood nightmare about “the Mucus Man” who keeps boogers in a suitcase, or the outrage his character displays once a facial injury takes him from “100% sex” all the way down to a mere 50%. Cage’s very first scene finds him staring bug-eyed into the camera, as if to emphasize that the film’s greatest asset is simply the way he moves his face.
Sympathy for the Devil hangs on Cage’s every word and gesture, and quite unlike so many lower-budget Cagesploitation efforts, the film keeps him in the middle of the action for its entire runtime. He never conspicuously ducks out of the plot for some less expensive actors to pad the runtime, and whenever David manages to break away, it’s never for very long.
Perhaps the Passenger’s constant presence is why David’s escape never quite feels plausible, but it’s tough to argue with the results, as more fleshed-out segments that center Kinnaman’s character would only distract from the main event. Beyond a regrettable stretch of weepy backstory, there’s a no-nonsense quality to the film that gives it a certain rickety charm. Sympathy for the Devil knows what its audience is here for, and with copious scenes of Cage going buck wild, it can hardly be faulted for failing to give that audience what it wants.
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