The Nicolas Cage movie inspired by ‘John Wick’
One of the best things to ever happen to the action genre was Nicolas Cage deciding that winning an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ marked the ideal jumping-off point for the acclaimed and eccentric actor to dip his toes into the waters of blockbuster cinema.
As a result, his next three features following Leaving Las Vegas were The Rock, Con Air, and Face/Off, which were released within less than 12 months of each other between June of 1996 and 1997. Not only do all three rank among the finest the decade has to offer, but they’re also firmly established as a trio of Hollywood’s most entertaining action-packed escapades of all time.
Another actor more than familiar with starring in a slew of the greats is Keanu Reeves, and he’s been keeping that up for decades through the likes of Point Break, Speed, The Matrix, and most recently, the John Wick franchise. It was the latter that played into one of Cage’s more recent outings, though, with writer and director Tim Brown’s The Retirement Plan focusing on a sun and alcohol-drenched ex-assassin.
Cage stars the grizzled Matt, who gets drawn into the life he thought he’d left behind in favour of booze and beaches when his granddaughter shows up at his Cayman Islands bolthole with word of her mother being in danger. Speaking to Collider, Brown made the comparisons crystal clear: “The only thing that I knew at the beginning was, what if John Wick became a beach bum and an alcoholic, and just did nothing for 40 years?”
Intriguing sales pitch aside, that thinking informed Cage’s entire arc in the film: “When he’s 70, could he have any ability at all? What would that ability be?” Brown continued. “That was the premise that I started with, and then it evolved.”
The Retirement Plan won’t go down as one of the most memorable projects of the renaissance Cage currently finds himself in the middle of, which makes it all the more ironic a movie that will end up inviting John Wick comparisons the actor himself was forced to address. Intimate drama Pig might not have much in common with Chad Stahelski’s gun-toting saga, to begin with, but that didn’t stop the internet from getting worked up by the prospect of the leading man going on a rampage of revenge when his prized porker goes missing.
Shooting down those theories to The Hollywood Reporter, Cage offered that he “couldn’t think of a movie further from John Wick than Pig“. In even more bad news for fans hoping to see him channel his mid-90s heyday, Cage even used his sentiment as a springboard to claim, “I don’t know that I will ever go back to those Jerry Bruckheimer-type spectacles.” In that case, The Retirement Plan will have to do as Cage’s riff on John Wick.
