Paul Schrader, one of the most interesting American filmmakers and screenwriters of the 1970s and ‘80s, directs this squalid pulp crime drama about small-time thugs and criminal losers in the Cleveland underworld. Nicolas Cage is recently paroled Troy, celebrating his release at a strip club with fellow ex-cons Mad Dog (Willem Dafoe), appropriately nicknamed thanks to an emotional hair-trigger and a lack of human empathy, and Diesel (Christopher Matthew Cook), when the trio decide they need a big job with real money. They agree to kidnap the infant son of a drug dealer who owes his boss $4 million, a simple scheme that blows up when they leave a trail of bodies behind, including the man who is supposed to pay the ransom. Based on the titular 1996 novel by career criminal turned pulp novelist Edward Bunker, Dog Eat Dog sports a fair amount of gallows humor within its violent story of deluded thugs at the bottom rungs of the criminal underworld. But the shadow of doom hangs over the film from the opening scene, in which Mad Dog murders two women in a drug-fueled fit of rage, and it continues through every bad decision up to the fatalistic ending. This is a violent, nihilistic film about nasty characters on a self-destructive path, but a far cry from similarly-themed works by Quentin Tarantino or Martin Scorsese. Optional. (S. Axmaker)
Dog Eat Dog
RLJ, 83 min., not rated, DVD or Blu-ray: $29.95, Dec. 27 Volume 32, Issue 2
Dog Eat Dog
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