The Retirement Plan

A young woman and her daughter, in order to escape a ruthless crime boss, turns to her estranged beach bum of a father, a man with a dangerous past.

Nicolas Cage does not know half-measures.

Known for dressing as if he was inspired by the alternate costumes for Tekken characters, Nicolas Cage is in an equal amount of absolutely amazing movies as he is in shockingly bad ones. He’s been in Pig, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, The Rock, Con Air, Wild at Heart, Mandy, The Color Out of Space, Adaptation, Kick-Ass, Peggy Sue Got Married, Gone in 60 Seconds, Raising Arizona, and of course, the Spider-Man: Spider-Verse series. But he was also in the execrable Left Behind, The Wicker Man, Army of One, Drive Angry, Season of the Witch, Bangkok Dangerous, both of the Ghost Rider films, Between Worlds, and Knowing, among so many others. Looking over his long, long oeuvre, it is immediately clear that there is just no middle of the road when it comes to Nicolas Cage. He is all, or nothing.

And that is why Nicolas Cage is Gen X’s greatest living actor…

But as I said, he is also someone who sometimes doesn’t make the best choices.

Case in point… The Retirement Plan.

Ashley Greene plays Ashley, which is a situation where I always kind of wonder if the reason a character’s name is the same as the actor’s name is maybe because the actor has too much difficulty remembering to respond to a different name than their own…

Anyway, Ashley hasn’t seen her father in decades, because she is still angry for how often he was absent when she was a kid, but when she runs afoul with a crime gang after stealing a McGuffin from them, she and her daughter must go on the run, and her father is her only option for hiding out, so they head for the Cayman Islands. Unfortunately for Ashley, an entire plane of thugs are flying down right behind her. But luckily for her, she has no idea that the reason her father was gone so much when she was a kid is because he used to be an assassin for the CIA. Even more luckily for her, despite her father now being retired, killing large groups of men in a variety of non-traditional ways is apparently a lot like riding a bike for him.

Cage, wearing a Hawaiian shirt with a beer in hand, certainly looks the part of a scraggly and long-haired Parrot Head living out his retirement on a Cayman Island beach, but the fight choreography makes the idea that he was once basically the CIA’s John Wick a little less believable. Unfortunately, that’s the story we’ve got, so there’s a lot of Nic Cage doing a pretty decent “Steven Seagal fight” impersonation against a long line of unimpressive stuntmen/character actors all taking obvious dives. “The grandpa! He keeps killing everybody!” Ron Perlman complains in his caveman growl over the phone to his boss, which is a really weird thing to say when you’re clearly 13 years older than the grandpa in question.

This is the kind of one-off mid-range fart of a film that ultimately makes you wonder not only how it ever got made, but why? Who liked this enough to finance it? It’s not like this film was that expensive, that’s clear just by looking at it, but still… how did the director/writer manage to get any money at all for this film? Especially using this script? I don’t understand what the attractive factor was when it came to this project. What was it about this film that brought not just Nicolas Cage, but Jackie Earl Haley, Ernie Hudson, and Ron Perlman on board? Everyone says that Money laundering is the reason films like this exists, which I understand from the Production House side, but what attracted the actors to the project? There’s nothing here.

Well, except for maybe a couple of weeks in the Caymans…

That’s probably it.

A totally disposable action comedy drama, with a really stupid plot and few laughs, The Retirement Plan is lit like a soap opera. It’s not so much that it’s poorly shot, it’s just that it looks generally terrible. I want to blame digital photography, especially in light of the fact that all of the digital effects, the blood splatter, the gunfire bursts, the explosions, even the fire, are also all so clearly awful. I get that it’s cheaper than film and practical effects to go digital, especially for smaller budget productions, but just from looking at this shit… is it really worth it?

The film is an all-around snoozer, so that’s the main problem, but the performances don’t do the project any favors either. Cage and the other notable names are all fine, of course, but there’s only so much you can do with nothing.

In the end, it isn’t that The Retirement Plan’s is all that terrible… I mean it IS terrible, but even worse than that… it’s boring and forgettable.