The One and Only Nicolas Cage | Five Films to Watch before 'Spider-Noir'

Mad genius or insufferable ham? Either way, I can't stop watching the legend that is Nic Cage.

“I am not a demon. I am a lizard, a shark, a heat-seeking panther. I want to be Bob Denver on acid playing the accordion.”

The man who said these words is Nicolas Kim Coppola,¹ better known professionally as Nicolas Cage. Cage is an enigma, a cipher, a man of many facets. To some, he is a beloved and talented actor, with a gift for the dramatic arts which has seen him traverse diverse roles in many genres. To others, he is a talentless, over-acting hack who ruins every project he touches.

To me? Cage is…well…both. Simultaneously. Sometimes in the same film. Sometimes in the same scene. And I can’t look away. No matter what sort of film he’s in, Cage will always find a way to make it watchable. His career has had its highs and lows, but with the new Marvel show Spider-Noir hitting our Amazon screens this week, I thought I would share some of the better fruits of my quixotic quest for Cage completionism. I tried to select one film from each of the various types of roles he has stepped into over the years, so rather than just picking my favorite 90s action movies you have a more varied understanding of the phenomenon that is Cage.

I warn you: stepping onto the path of Cage is not for the faint of heart. It is a road fraught with twists and turns, highs and lows, exhilaration and boredom. Many of his films I can’t in good conscience recommend to anyone, much less a Catholic audience. But there are diamonds in the rough and if you can stand him, I think your film diet will be richer by ingesting a little Cage.

Without further ado, here are five films to introduce you to the different facets of the strange career of the man, the myth, the legend: Nicolas Cage.

Moonstruck (1987)

The Heartthrob

Best Cage line: “I lost my hand! I lost my bride! Johnny has his hand! Johnny has his bride!”

Yes, he does have a fake wooden hand.

Moonstruck is my favorite of Cage’s romantic roles, a phase which dominated his early career. He plays Ronny Cammareri, a baker with a love of opera who falls in love with his brother’s fiancee (played by Cher in an Oscar-winning performance). It is perhaps the most Italian movie ever made, a love letter to the culture in which young Nic Coppola had grown up. Its cavalier attitude towards pre-marital sex makes this one a qualified recommendation, but its values are, at root, solid. The characters are charming, the jokes are delightfully funny, the writing, drama, and emotional resonance are at times Shakespearean, and it is at heart a film about love, family, and the meaning of life.

The Rock (1996)

The Action Hero

Best Cage line: “Well, I'm one of those fortunate people who like my job, sir. Got my first chemistry set when I was seven, blew my eyebrows off, we never saw the cat again, been into it ever since.”

My favorite Cage phase is definitely his streak of 90s action films. Face/Off, Con Air, and Gone in 60 Seconds are all vintage Cage classics. But perhaps the best of the bunch is The Rock, because Cage’s cheesy acting style is complemented by the similar talents of director Michael Bay and co-star Sean Connery. Sean Connery plays James Bon…err, John Mason, the only man to ever escape from Alcatraz. When a group of disgruntled military vets take the island prison and threaten to use it to release a deadly nerve gas on San Francisco, he is recruited by Cage’s FBI chemist Stanley Goodspeed (yes, that is the character’s name) to infiltrate the island and stop the terrorists. It’s a non-stop thrill ride of actors and directors constantly one-upping each other to do the most over-the-top thing possible, and it’s glorious. If you’re a fan of 90s action films…well, you’ve seen it already, but if not, this is a cinematic treat just waiting for you to watch it.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011)

The Franchise Star

Best Cage line: “Because right now the only thing that’s standing between you and the Rider is me. And he’s just - He’s... [groans] He’s scraping at the door. Scraping at the door!”

Cage plays Spider-Man this week, but it’s not the first time he’s played a big name franchise character. He’s played Superman (Teen Titans Go! To the Movies; The Flash), Dracula (Renfield), and a knock-off Batman (Kick-Ass). But the supernatural role he was born to play is Ghost Rider. The first Ghost Rider film is fine, but it’s in the poorly-regarded sequel that the character truly gets the adaptation he deserves.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance may, in fact, be the most Traditional Catholic film I’ve ever seen.

I don’t mean Traditional Catholic in a pre-Vatican II sense. I don’t even mean it in a Council of Trent kind of sense. I mean this film is in the Catholic Tradition that gave us Dante and the Book of Revelation, Michelangelo and Hieronymous Bosch, St. Francis of Assisi and St. Simeon Stylites, the Templars and the Knights Hospitaller, St. Vincent Ferrar and Girolamo Savonarola, the Sedlec Ossuary and Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini. That brought us the God-Man willing to die on a Cross to drown our contract with Satan in His life-giving Blood.

It’s that kind of heavy metal Catholicism that namby-pamby modern man tries to excise out of the tradition, that we are embarrassed by and try to hide when “the right set” are about. We think that because we know that God is Love that we have comprehended every facet of His Being.

The medievals knew God is Love. They also knew He was terrifying.

Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is the kind of film you could show Dante or Geoffrey Chaucer and they'd be right at home. It's ridiculous, it's un-nuanced, it's reverently irreverent, it's more than a little unhinged, and it's unspeakably cool. It has the weird mix of decent theology, paranoid spiritual warfare, and unadulterated mythology that any student of medieval literature will be well familiar with. Don’t be fooled by the bad reviews: this is Nic Cage’s best film. And possibly the best superhero film of all time.

Pig (2021)

The Indie Darling

Best Cage line: “Why do you care about these people? They don’t care about you. None of them. They don’t even know you because you haven’t shown them. Every day, you’ll wake up, and there’ll be less of you. You live your life for them, and they don’t even see you.”

Cage has a reputation for being a crazy, over-the-top actor, but he’s also taken on many serious dramatic roles over the years, and within the past decade he’s become something of an indie darling. The film that best exemplifies this stage of his career is 2021’s Pig (full review here). Pig is a contemplative film about loss, love, and the sacramentality of food. The marketing played up Cage’s reputation as an action star only for the film itself to subvert that image, giving us a restrained Cage in a subtle, excellent role. Cage has indeed won an Oscar (Leaving Las Vegas, 1995) and has the dramatic chops to pull off serious roles, and it is only recently that he has once again started to become appreciated for that side of his career. The Cage freak-out memes are funny, but with films like Pig we see a different side of Cage, one which intrigues and delights the true Cage connoisseur.

Outcast (2014)

The Master of Slop

Best Cage line: “You want my blood? YOU WANT MY BLOOD???”

Cage had a well-documented slump in the middle of his career. He was not very choosy about the roles he took, and so ended up in a lot of incredibly bad films. Sometimes, these films resulted in mostly forgettable and phoned-in performances (such as the 2014 remake of the Christian apocalypse series Left Behind). Sometimes, Nic Cage is introduced with twin snakes entwined around his arms, chanting like a mad shaman out of some sort of fever dream.

In Outcast, Cage and Hayden Christiansen play exiled crusaders who team up with a Chinese princess to put her brother in his rightful place as Emperor. It’s unhinged, it’s not very good, but at least it’s quite entertaining and that’s the best you can ask out of Cage’s slop era. He got to cut loose and just have some fun and when that happens, there’s magic in a Cage performance.

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There are my five picks to represent the different phases of the Cage. Comment below with your favorite Cage performance, and stay tuned for our review of his turn as Your (un)Friendly (bad) Neighborhood Spider-Man! In Authentic Black and White, of course, the only true noir way to experience it. Cage deserves nothing less.

1. Yes, Francis Ford Coppola is his uncle. Yes, that’s how he got into show business. If only all nepotism gave us such an…interesting career.