'Stolen' Review: It feels monotonous and one-note

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Malin Akerman, Josh Lucas

Director: Simon West

Adding another entry to his already long list of embarrassing movie choices, Nicolas Cage stars as a desperate man trying to track down his teenage daughter in Stolen. Sure that premise sounds suspiciously similar to Liam Neeson’s career reinventing hit Taken, but this film doesn’t deliver any of the guilty pleasure offered by that 2008 actioner.

Cage plays Will, a veteran thief who is released from prison eight years after he was arrested for his involvement in a heist that didn’t quite pan out. Will wants to reconnect with his estranged daughter, but as it turns out, she gets kidnapped and bunged into the boot of a taxi by his crazy former partner (Josh Lucas), who wants his share of that final robbery they undertook together, which he’s convinced Will has been hiding all along.

It’s a premise ripe for unintentional laughs, but Expendables 2 director Simon West and Cage himself seem to be taking the material too seriously to have much fun with it. Only Josh Lucas delivers a deliciously over-the-top performance as the manic one-legged villain with missing fingers. The action isn’t bad, but it all feels monotonous and one-note. Setting the story against Mardi Gras celebrations in New Orleans lends some color to this mostly flat thriller, but not enough to merit a watch.

I’m going with one-and-a-half out of five for Stolen. Cage himself looks like he couldn’t care less. Why should you?

Rating: 1.5 / 5

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