Recensioni de* critic*

In "Dog Eat Dog," the compositional poise and its defiant allure are matched by a screeching yet fascinating ugliness that results from the clashing of acidulous colors, which drives visual pleasure to the point of shame. The movie's very subject is the glimmer of redemption that glistens in the muck of the gutter, and the borderline camp of Schrader's garish schema presses past the laughter and the disgust to the transcendence of folly.

I did not particularly enjoy Dog Eat Dog... the film would appear a protracted exercise in boundary-testing, the likes of which you'd maybe expect instead from a Rodriguez or a Carnahan. Cage's plummy invocations of Humphrey Bogart and Dafoe's blue collar whack-dealer are ghoulish, hilarious, discomfiting... Dog Eat Dog does not, to my mind, rank among his best work—but then, that hardly mattered during this interview.

As the writer of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and the director of the likes of Blue Collar, Light Sleeper, and Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters, Schrader has made a career of mainlining dark and self-destructive drives. But here, his direction is a randomized variable, sometimes leaden, sometimes inspired, never cogent.

Despite its slim running time — barely over an hour and a half — "Dog Eat Dog" somehow feels like six different movies. The first one, which depicts an especially appalling double murder through the speedy, sickly colorful perspective of an extended drug binge, is probably the least effective of the batch. But it lets you know that the filmmakers are not coming at you from a benevolent place, and that impression never lets up.

It's a film whose outré sense of abandon is completely predicated on how much of a mess it is. What begins as a suitably madcap black-comedy romp, depicting the frenzied headspace of an unhinged addict in the depths of an interminable binge, splinters off into a riotous, exhausting mélange of visual and narrative styles, its over-driven mixture of camera tricks, gonzo violence, and grim gags never finding a remotely coherent focus.

It requires a unique level of creative autonomy to make a film as gleefully uninhibited as Dog Eat Dog. Luckily for director Paul Schrader, he's been granted that freedom with his latest feature, a feverish pillaging of classic and contemporary crime that plays at once like a pastiche of its stars' many low-rent gangster personas and a cri du cœur for auteurist conviction.

Schrader himself seemed perfectly lucid to the free-wheeling stylistics and faintly ludicrous narrative of Dog Eat Dog, telling the audience at the Théâtre Croisette not to take the film too seriously, and treat it simply with a sense of fun. Wise words of advice indeed.

Full disclosure: I'm friends with its screenwriter. But I was genuinely impressed with this relentlessly twisted, violent, funny Edward Bunker adaptation... As the unhinged, doped-up loose cannon of the group, Willem Dafoe is terrifyingly hilarious. And Nicolas Cage, playing the lead hood, finally gets a chance to mix his still-considerable charisma with menace, delivering a performance where his energetic, occasionally goofy choices for once actually make sense

As with Schrader's vastly underrated porn industry satire, The Canyons, this new film possesses a nothing-to-lose energy that powers it inelegantly past the finish line and beyond. It feels like the kind of film that Robert Rodriguez has been trying and failing to make for the past 20 years, with its ultra salty banter, perpetual wisecracking, casual violence and a dark soul that glimmers with nostalgic reverence.

A turgid meta-noir written by Matthew Wilder (like Schrader, a former film critic) that plays like Elmore Leonard's overheated leftovers... The three [main characters] become embroiled in a harebrained kidnapping scheme that's at once antic and tedious, and the body count of innocent bystanders in this movie is too high to write off as somehow essential to the plot, themes or style. Instead, it's merely sadistic.

One thing that can be said about brazen crime comedy Dog Eat Dog is that it's a full-blooded venture in every respect, with Schrader and his leads Cage and Willem Dafoe clearly enjoying the gore-soaked frenzy. But the film also feels like a too- familiar reheating of in-your-face Tarantino-style crime tropes, brought up to date for the Breaking Bad era of mordant grand guignol.