Feels like surviving Cage’s Sunshine Trilogy was a pretty epic accomplishment in this trek to summit the entire catalog of the WATC(H) filmography. If we haven’t arrived at Base Camp just yet, we’ve at least begun to plateau near the foothills of the Himalayas while still looking up at Everest. 

Of the Cage good guy roles, I liked Charlie from It Could Happen to You the best, but he was also the most boring of the lot. Agent Chesnic, Cage’s straight-laced secret service agent from Guarding Tess was watchable in his dutiful responsibilities, but not crazed or human enough for my taste. Jack Singer was relatably human and had his moments of frantic live-wire Cage in Honeymoon in Vegas and was an overall pretty decent guy (other than losing his fiancé in a poker game). But all-in-all, all these sunnier Cage roles felt more like an ill-tailored jacket he was trying on for a while that just didn’t fit right, and needed to be discarded.

I am glad we are now moving onward and upward, or more likely downward and to the side, for more abstract and weird Cage roles. At least for a little while…

Starting with Kiss of Death (1995) we are treated to a true Cage villain in Little Junior Brown. The best way to describe Little Junior Brown is to take Sailor Ripley (Wild at Heart) and throw him in a personality blender with Eddie (Deadfall) and maybe pepper in a little bit of Peter Loew (from Vampire’s Kiss). The result, a pretty ripped, asthmatic, tough guy who lives by his goodfellas values summed up by his life acronym: B.A.D (balls, attitude, and direction). 

But before we get into the unique character of Little Junior Brown, let’s dive into a quick summary of this gritty crime drama.

Summary

Kiss of Death (1995) which is one of at least 6 movies with this same title, tells the story of Jimmy (played by David Caruso) an ex-con who is recently out of prison and looking for a clean start with his wife (played by Helen Hunt) and young daughter. Struggling to make ends meet, Jimmy reluctantly agrees to help his cousin Ronny (played by Michael Rappaport) do one quick job, driving a truck for a few hours to earn a few grand and stay in the good graces of Little Junior Brown. Surprising no one at all, a police sting intercepts the fleet of stolen vehicles putting Jimmy’s future at risk. 

Attempting to defuse the situation before it gets out of hand, Jimmy attempts to stop a truck driver from shooting detective Calvin Hart (played by Samuel L Jackson). Instead, Jimmy is shot through the hand, Hart is shot in the face and the two men wind up in the hospital together, while Ronny escapes the police. 

Things spin out of control from here as Jimmy is sent back to prison for not ratting out his cousin Ronny (who escaped the raid) or the enterprise of the gang lead by Little Junior Brown (played by Nicolas Cage). 

While Jimmy is in prison his wife dies under mysterious circumstances (indirectly caused by Ronny) and decides to work as a confidential informant to help the D.A. Frank Zioli (played by Stanley Tucci) bring down Little Junior Brown as a way to escape the clutches of both police and crime bosses, and be free to take care of his, now orphaned daughter.  Earning the trust of Little Junior Brown, Jimmy witnesses the murder of Omar (played by Ving Rhames) by Brown, and later discovers that Omar was also a confidential informant in a parallel case being conducted by the FBI. 

Jimmy, who now has evidence against Brown, must use his wits and ingenuity to escape both the political corruption of the state police and FBI who want to use him and discard him into the hands of the vengeful Little Junior Brown who has discovered the betrayal. Working closely with the now empathetic detective Hart, Jimmy finds a way to put Junior behind bars and keep Zioli from using the situation as a political maneuver by wearing a wire and getting confessions to wrong-doing from both men. He sets sail into the sunset with his daughter and now love-interest (weirdly, his former teenage babysitter turned girlfriend) Rosie (played by Kathryn Erbe) 

The World According to Little Junior Brown

Suffice it to say, the charm of David Caruso is completely lost on me. I never watched NYPD Blue or any of the eternal CSI-related franchises that he was best known for. To me, he’s just a brooding red-head dude, who seems not all that tough, smart, or interesting. But evidently in 1996, he was the up-and-coming crime actor which put him in line for this central role as the trying-hard-but-not-too-hard-to-reform ex-con, Jimmy. Thankfully (for me anyway) they cast him opposite a genuinely interesting actor who was playing Little Junior Brown.

Even with such a talented class of actors, Little Junior Brown is the main reason to bother watching Kiss of Death. He steals the scenes and pulls all the real action his way. The son of an aging and emphysemic Big Junior Brown (played by Philip Baker Hall) Little Junior is the de facto leader of the crime ring as he has the muscle and the “balls, attitude, and direction” to get the shit done that needs doing. 

We get a new look and style from Cage (as Junior) that we haven’t seen in any other characters so far. Shortly trimmed hair (accentuating his receding hairline) a close-shave goatee and his suns-out-guns-out muscle T’s to highlight his fit and muscular arms. Little Junior’s physical prowess and dangerous personality is established right away. In the first scene that he appears in, he drags a guy out of a big rig and throws him ten feet into the side of another truck, before pummeling him unconscious. Later, at his regular stomping grounds, a strip club called Baby Cakes, Little Junior shows off his muscle by bench pressing his girlfriend stripper (played by Hope Davis) fifty times in the air (“Jesus what you been eatin?”) to the impressed cheers of a small strip club audience. 

But true to form, Cage doesn’t even play a crime boss without finding the peculiarities in his personality. We know that Big Junior requires an oxygen tank to survive and this bothers Little Junior who has asthma himself, which he treats regularly with a silver/gold embossed decorative inhaler. He tells Jimmy at one point, if he gets to the point where breathing becomes too hard he’d rather someone “shoot him in the head.” 

After killing the informant Omar, Junior also makes a confession to Jimmy in a moment of vulnerability. 

“Know what I hate more than anything? I hate the taste of metal in my mouth. Silverware makes me gag. I gotta use plastic forks and spoons all the time. I never told anyone about me and the metal tasting before.” 

Weird lines like this make me wonder about how much Cage improvisation is at play here with the script or if the casting had Cage in mind to begin with. Either way, a really tough and violent man who carries his new boom box to the location of a bludgeoning, or puffs on his inhaler, or can’t stand the taste of metal in his mouth, definitely makes an otherwise hackneyed type a little more intriguing. 

Of course admitting his weakness to his “unknown” enemy comes back to “bite him” by the end of the film. (Superman should have never let Lex Luther know about the whole Kryptonite thing.)

But we also get to know the mind of Little Junior Brown pretty well and nothing he does should really surprise us in the end because of his personal motto.

B.A.D.

In Wild at Heart, we get Sailor Ripley’s snakeskin jacket, which he describes as a “symbol of his personal freedom” and “individuality.” In this movie, we get Little Junior Brown’s mission statement: B.A.D. 

And he’s bad alright. When he first teams up with Jimmy he explains the concept to him, 

“You know what an acronym is? It’s like letters that stand for things. You know like F.B.I., TGIF. You understand? I have an acronym for myself. You what it is. B.A.D. B-A-D. Balls. Attitude. Direction. You should get an acronym. It helps you visualize your goals.”

Insightful. 

When Jimmy shares his on-the-spot acronym of F.A.B. or “fucked at birth” Little Junior fails to find the humor.  He says, “No good, too negative” ending the conversation.

The Wire

It would be another seven years before the HBO series The Wire would introduce viewers to the gritty underworld of a urban Baltimore neighborhood and how police fought crime through surveillance and sound recordings, but the concept of ‘using a wire’ to record conversations, gather evidence, and incriminate drug-dealers or crime families was already present here in Kiss of Death. “Ratting somone out”, “narc-ing”, getting a “plea deal”, “working with the feds” and finding safety in “witness relocation” were all themes that came to prominence in this “wearing a wire” era of police drama. All of these tropes were present in Kiss of Death and drove the action. 

With the advent of the iPhone / smart phones and more sophisticated technologies / science (e.g. surveillance cameras, gps tracking, DNA evidence) one could speculate that the era of the “wire” is now officially dead and buried. 

(Aside: I remember as a kid wanting to unscrew the mouthpiece / earpiece of my rotary phone so I could implant some kind of recording device or bug to record conversations, like I’d seen in spy movies. It seemed pretty easy to do. Now we have voice memos that can be recorded on the fly and with a click of the button.)

When Jimmy strikes up conversations with Little Junior Brown and the D.A. Frank Zioli, they admit to wrong-doing which allows Jimmy to get out from under the thumb of both the crime family and the police / politicians. Makes me wonder though if these things would even be admissible in court today with all of the AI and deep fakes that exist in our world. Could a conversation be proven without reasonable doubt. 

Odds and Ends

Other than Little Junior Brown doing his thing, this movie was not all that interesting to me. Here’s a few odds and ends that were at least mentionable in this review.

• Detective Hart, who get shot in the face, in the first action sequence is pretty angry at Jimmy throughout the movie because his eye tears up all the time and he “cant’ take his kids to the beach” without getting bad migraines from the sun. That would be pretty sucky, but I guess if you got shot in the face, maybe you’d be happy to just be alive?
• Ronny (played by a young slender, Rappaport) is a real first rate sleaze ball. He gets Jimmy involved in the mishandled car thievery operation the result of which is Jimmy is thrown back into prison, he stiffs Jimmy’s wife out of most of the mob money from Big Junior Brown, then he (most likely) spikes her drink and date rapes her, and gets her killed (inadvertently). You were kind of rooting for Little Junior at the point that Ronny gets his brutal come-uppance.

• Zioli is a second rate sleaze ball. Typical politician. All promise, all lies.
• Rosie and Jimmy becoming a romantic thing was weird and awkward. First she’s a teenag babysitter whose family takes on care of Corinna (Jimmy’s child) while he is in prison. Then she is taken with Jimmy (a ex-con) whom she wouldn’t really know all that well and decides just to be with him after he comes out of prison (with zero prospects in life). If I believe this narrative arc, she could be the saddest, most tragic character in any movie I’ve seen (I mean, c’mon, it’s David Caruso, not Brad Pitt here.) But I didn’t believe it so it was just kind of laughable. 

• The tense abduction scene that was unsettling and then funny. While Jimmy is in protective custody awaiting action against the incarcerated Little Junior, Little Junior sends his minions (strippers mostly) out to where Jimmy’s daughter is being guarded. While the police are distracted by the strippers, the girl Corinna disappears. After a frantic search of the surrounding woods, Jimmy finds his daughter unharmed, but smeared across her face in lipstick (?) are the swervy letters. B.A.D. Priceless. 

First for a Nicolas Cage movie as Little Junior Brown

• First time using an inhaler for asthma
• Bench pressing a stripper (or another human)
• Jumping rope (in a menacing way)
• Bludgeoning a guy to death while wearing a rain coat
• Wearing a white tank top with circular holes sewn into the sides to show off his ribs (?)

Recurrences

• Appearance with Samuel L Jackson (see Amos and Andrew)
• Appearance in a movie with Stanley Tucci (see It Could Happen to You)
• Appearance in a movie with Helen Hunt (see Peggy Sue Got Married) 
• Tantrum / fight in a strip club (see Deadfall)
• In prison (Multiple)
• With a bandaged face (see Birdy, Racing with the Moon)

Best quotes as Little Junior Brown

“Time has come for everyone to clean up their own backyard.”

“Ah man. I just bought this thing.” Upset because he’s gotten blood on his new boom box that he brought to a planned beating.

“What did I do? You fuck with the bull you get the horns! That’s what I did.” Responding to Jimmy’s question about why he killed Omar.

“I couldn’t get plastic forks in jail. I had to eat everything with my fingers.” 

In conclusion 

It was the use of the wire that ultimately brought down Little Junior Brown, but not before he shined on stage brighter than all of Cage’s previous Sunshine Trilogy performances combined. While I will, no doubt, never watch the movie Kiss of Death again (not even sure why it was even titled that in hindsight) it was worth it to see it once just to get a taste for Cage as a true, but oddball villain. I am looking forward to watching some of his more villainous portrayals in the films to come such as Face/Off, The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans  and others.

Now I gotta go work on my personal acronym… C.U.L8.R