#62: The Trust/Dog Eat Dog

This week, Nathan and Clint are pleasantly surprised to find two non-stinkers in Cage's 2010s output! First, there's The Trust, a darkly-comic heist thriller about two amoral cops (A mustachioed Nicolas Cage alongside a wiry, disaffected Elijah Wood) who plot to steal a mysterious stash from unknown criminals, only to find themselves wayyy in over their heads. Cage and Wood are fantastic together as two losers forging a curious, fractious partnership out of economic necessity, and there are some great little moments from Cage as a corrupt father figure of sorts.

Then there's the Eddie Bunker novel adaptation Dog Eat Dog, Paul Schrader's semi-redemption from the execrable Dying of the Light. This time, Cage plays a Bogey-obsessed ex-con who ropes in his fellow criminal pals (Christopher Matthew Cook and Willem Dafoe, the latter doing his damndest to out-Cage Cage with his wily psychopath Mad Dog) into a hapless plan to kidnap the baby of a local gangland rival. Things go to pot as predicted, and Schrader paints their eventual fall with all the Expressionistic verve of his later works.