The Retirement Plan

As you may have guessed by now, I’m a Cage fan. I haven’t seen nearly all his movies (there are so many!), but whenever I do, I know it’s gonna be a good day. It was the insane and awesome Mandy initially piqued my interest, and the incredible Pig (my favorite movie of 2021) kicked it into high gear. I think it’s because I’ve never seen him phone in a performance. He’s taken all sorts of roles in all sorts of movies, and he’s always giving it his all. He may make some absurd choices, but he commits. This leads those which are bad to at least end up very fun, such as Ghost Rider, an absolutely awful film that I adore nonetheless.

It’s well known why he stepped away from his Hollywood stardom and began saying yes to anyone bold enough to ask: tax debt. He confirmed last year he’d finally paid off his debts, so we can expect him to become more selective with his appearances, although he intends to stay involved in the indie scene since he’s enjoyed making them more than big Hollywood films.

I mention all of this because I cannot wait for that to kick in. Production schedules and COVID delays and such mean that movies filmed in 2021 which he agreed to before his debts were resolved are still coming out now. The Retirement Plan is one such movie, and it shows.

We open on Jimmy (Jordan Johnson-Hinds) and Ashley (Ashley Greene) stealing a flash drive from Donnie (Jackie Earle Haley). They secretly stash the flash drive in their daughter Sarah’s (Thalia Campbell) backpack, then send her to her grandfather Matt (Nicolas Cage) in the Caymans. Clearly, he was some sort of government agent, as he has multiple aliases and talks about being forced into retirement 20 years ago. Meanwhile, Ashley is captured and forced to lead Donnie’s men to recover the flash drive, which doesn’t prove as easy as they thought. Lead goon Bobo (Ron Pearlman) does inadvertently kidnap Sarah, lending him and Donnie some much needed leverage, and giving Ashley and Matt reason to hunt the bad guys. Little do they know just how deep this whole thing goes…

I won’t get into the additional layers in any detail, because they don’t really matter. It involves a government handler (Lynn Whitfield), her boss (Rick Fox), a gangster named Hector (Grace Byers), and a rat. Which leads to two observations. One, the cast of this movie is absurd. As the opening credits rolled, and I recognized name after name, my eyes grew wider and wider. And that’s before I tell you Ernie Hudson and character actor Joel David Moore also show up. Two, this movie is so needlessly convoluted that omitting huge chunks of it won’t leave you the slightest bit confused.

It’s trying desperately to be a spy thriller, and to do the “dad has a secret past” thing, which they somehow manage to make boring. The most intriguing piece of the film is actually the relationship between Bobo and Sarah, where Bobo is showing that he’s a bit more thoughtful, more intellectual, and that he’s not really a bad guy but just sort of fell into this life on account of being adopted and raised by bad people. Sarah’s old enough to remain wary of him, but they begin to bond over Othello. All of this is aided by Pearlman playing Bobo as both intimidating but kinda laid back, which contrasts to the severe intensity of all the rest of the villains.

Little of the action is anything noteworthy. Some of it is quite stupid, such as an extended scene involving Ernie Hudson’s boat. Part of the issue is that Matt is nigh indestructible, despite being much older than any of his assailants, many of whom have weapons while he often has none. As such, there isn’t much in the way of stakes for the combat. It need to be all about innovative ways of killing the bad guys, of which there are few.

The movie thinks it has killer style, what with some slick villains and tropical scenery (it was shot on location in the Caymans). It does Guy Ritchie-style frozen character nameplates complete with a whip sound effect, but it just feels out of place in a movie populated by middle aged gangsters. The attempts at humor are incredibly weak, with the few laughs largely coming from our disbelief that the movie thinks it’s cool. The filmmakers show their lack of confidence when they feel the need to label every single location we go to, some multiple times despite similar establishing shots. It’s embarrassing.

These little things, combined with a bland and uncreative story, make for a very boring watch. The acting is all fine, as you’d expect from a stable of all-stars. But the characters are cookie cutter, so it’s all for naught. And we spend so much time with the higher ups as things happen behind the scenes that it’s hard to connect with what’s happening on the ground.

The filmmakers were able to land some huge talent, but had no idea how to integrate them all. The result is a mess of a film with no real character or charm, and which fails to go far enough in any direction to make it memorable. This is your classic straight-to-video movie, destined to be a curiosity people stumble across for a long time, and forgotten by all who watch it.