Sometimes we are our own worst enemy. 

This is both the unvoiced lesson learned from the characters portrayed in WATC(H) movie #74, Dog Eat Dog (2016); it’s also the message Paul Schrader should have learned from his 21st (ish) directed feature film. To the man’s credit, Schrader has written (and directed) some pretty epic and engaging films (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Bringing Out the Dead, First Reformed) but this, unfortunately, was not one of them. 

But even in films that seem set on self-destruct from the outset, we still get the genius of Nicolas Cage (and, double-bonus, a very quirky Willem Dafoe) in this one to provide a lot of entertainment. It’s a bad film for sure, but Cage and Dafoe take it on with characteristic panache.

With a title like Dog Eat Dog, I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised with the final outcome (or tenor) of the film, but given Schrader’s resume, I expected a bit more meaning embedded in all his nihilism. 

The World According to Troy 

The film begins with Mad Dog (Dafoe) shooting heroin (?) and watching daytime television in a very pink room of a house. I’m talking nauseatingly pink, Pepto Bismol, with giant floral wallpaper on every wall. Mad Dog (as his name explicitly states) is a very mentally disturbed ex-con who is living off of the kindness (and gas card) of a large Christian woman named Sheila. Sheila seems ready for Mad Dog to move out (sans her gas card) as he has been sleeping on her couch for sometime it seems, and when she discovers porn on her computer, she tries to evict him on the spot. This leads to a physical confrontation in which the now rabid mad dog violently pulls a knife from an ankle holster and stabs Sheila (many times) to death in her living room, before chasing down her tweenaged daughter and shooting her (through a pillow) in the head.

Violent, crazy, visually striking? 

Yep, and that’s just the first 8 minutes of the movie. From there (believe it or not) things just go downhill pretty steadily. We are introduced to the other two parts of this debased convict Trinity, Troy (Nicolas Cage) and Diesel (Christopher Matthew Cook), in the seamy confines of a black-and-white strip club. (Evidently Paul Schrader said he felt the strip club motif was pretty tired and overused at this point, and since he hadn’t seen one shot in black and white since Lenny he thought it might add something new to this scene.) Troy, the most recent parolee of the three, provides narration and introduces the three in context to their activities and time in prison.

Mad Dog is the wild card, a guy whom most people (justifiably) can’t trust. Troy feels as if he owes Mad Dog his loyalty since MD took the rap (and added jail time) in an altercation Troy was responsible for. 

Diesel is the heavy, the muscle, a guy who doesn’t mince words and who has worked as a loan shark. He dislikes Mad Dog, but trust Troy and follows his leadership.

Troy, fresh from prison and sporting a turquoise suit, is the ringleader of the three. He’s also the narrator of the action. He works with el Greco (played by director Paul Schrader) to find legally questionable work that hopefully won’t land them all back in jail. 

The movie is probably not worth summarizing to be honest. I’d say three main things happen. 

Thing 1: Troy and the crew are enlisted by el Greco to steal money from a black drug dealer in Cleveland. They pretend to be policemen, apprehend the guy and raid his flophouse where they don’t find money, but instead find (surprise) a lot of drugs. The theft goes sideways, but the three somehow survive and use their pay from the score for…

Thing 2: A night of debauchery at a local casino. Each of the triumvirate tries to find a suitable mate for the night, but each of them fails miserably. Troy even offers his prostitute the opportunity of traveling to southern France with him (and he buys her an expensive necklace) but she spurns him. The morale of the story seems to be that neither of the three is very well suited for any kind of life outside of prison. They end up having a crazy food fight in their hotel room with booze, mustard and ketchup.  

Thing 3: The three are enlisted by a tough guy Latino named Chepe to kidnap a baby in order to extort a lot of money from the child’s father who owes Chepe bigtime.  Instead, Mad Dog accidentally shoots the father dead in his home, thus ruining the arrangement, and the three must scramble to deal with a kidnapped baby and the wrath of Chepe.

Things spin out of control after these three things happen, as the “Keystone” Cons just can’t seem to get out of their own way. While disposing of the father’s body in a “secret place” Mad Dog has used in the past, a nasty crack house / storage facility, Diesel kind of loses his mind and ends up killing Mad Dog (RIP). Returning to find Troy, Diesel and Troy end up stopping at local supermarket while regrouping and trying to decide how to placate Chepe. When a clerk notices Diesel is carrying a concealed weapon in his pants, he informs the police who arrive and attempt to arrest the two. Shit happens. A cop gets killed in the melee and Diesel attempting to escape wrecks his SUV. 

Troy gets apprehended and taken to a remote location by the vengeful cops for some frontier justice. Handcuffed to the police car, Troy gets dragged around somewhere in a dark deserted area of town until he (presumably) dies, but not before having a weird vision of himself as Humphry Bogart and carjacking an elderly black couple from an old fashioned diner (very Twin Peaksie). 

Even in the vision, with gospel music playing in a likely post-death hallucination for Troy, the police show up again to apprehend him, shoot up the car (and innocent people inside) and also Troy (ensuring the audience that he is indeed dead…twice I guess.) The end.

No Point Really

While researching the ending of this movie because I thought it must surely be referencing a Bogart I haven’t seen, I watched a Youtube reviewer talk about Dog Eat Dog. He seemed pretty flummoxed as to what the point of it was. He lamented it over and over again. Saying, “what’s the point of this movie?” I have no idea. Like me, he recognized that this was a Paul Schrader production and like me, he seemed to find Cage highly entertaining and was expectant that the movie would offer some promising cinema, but by the end you could tell the guy was frustrated. 

I don’t think I was as frustrated as much as I was just bored. About 45 minutes in, I wanted the film to end because it lacked coherence and an overarching point. Even though Cage drives the action and is the “glue” for the group of misfit ex-cons, the movie seemed much more focused on Mad Dog as some kind of psychological case study on mental illness. Mad Dog is entertaining in a twisted sort of way, but he can’t really carry the plot forward on his own. And he’s the first to be killed off in a pretty inexplicable scene. 

Schrader says the film was just his new take on the genre of crime movies and tropes of the past. He told the crew that they didn’t have a large budget to make it but they can do whatever they wanted. He definitely opened the playground for Cage and Dafoe. In an interview Schrader also talked a lot about how the film was some kind of commentary on social media and power of our smart phones to distract us or some nonsense along those lines, but I’m not sure I’m buying it. Stylistically, it did seem like the tale told by ADHD as it had no consistency or coherent structure. I think it needed a Scorsese rescue (see Bringing Out the Dead) to help find the directorial vision and a plot.

So, yeah, there wasn’t much point to this film other than a dark view of three people not fit to live in civilized society. You could almost pair this stinker with Trapped in Paradise as its strange comedic twin film. 

Firsts for Nicolas Cage as Troy

• Talking about social media (Facebook). 
• First time in a movie referencing Taylor Swift.
• Sporting a turquoise suit 
• Robbing drug dealers by impersonating a cop
• Idolizing and imitating Humphrey Bogart
• Drinking a Bloody Mary in a Casino
• First time in Ohio
• Having a shirtless ketchup and mustard fight with two other men
• Dragged behind a cop car (till dead)

Recurrences

• Playing an ex-con (Raising Arizona, Wild at Heart, Amos and Andrew, Kiss of Death, Con Air, Face/Off, Kick Ass, Drive Angry, Stolen)
• Inside a strip club (Deadfall, Kiss of Death, 8MM)
• Shot (The Cotton Club, Windtalkers, Joe, Drive Angry, Adaptation, Lord of War, Bangkok Dangerous, Kick Ass, Trespass, Rage, The Trust)
• Saying “fucking France!” (Deadfall)
• Kidnapping a baby (Raising Arizona)
• Awkwardly forcing a kiss on a woman who was not consenting to one (Vampire’s Kiss)

Quotes 

“People pretty much can’t stand Mad Dog and I get it, I do. But what you gotta understand is that I know this guy in a very particular way.”

“Diesel is a big lug nut looking dude, but he’s very bright.”

“We were fuckin Facebook friends before there was a Facebook.”

“These hood rats, man. I think they been watching too much Black Entertainment Television or something.”

“Try to show up even if your fucked up so I know your not dead.”

“Have you ever been to Nice?”

“I’ll get us such a good gig it’ll cut your tits off!”

“Option 1 is total victory, and that is what I am planning on!”

“I didn’t want justice. I just wanted what I wanted. And the rest was verbiage.”

Conclusion

If you enjoy spastic character portrayals, this might not be the worst movie for you. Nicolas Cage pretends to be Humphry Bogart. Willem Dafoe plays a true psychopath whom you occasionally (briefly) have some sympathy for and Paul Schrader, turns out, plays a pretty good gangster type. But if you want a movie with a point, or a story arc, or a noticeable plot, Dog Eat Dog is not the one. It’s not an art house movie, or a gangster film, or a blockbuster. It’s just three guys unintentionally self-destructing as quickly as possibly (and yet not quickly enough). David Lynch would have appreciated the bizarree beginning and end to this film and I’d recommend just the first and last 8 minutes. Maybe you can Youtube them. 

As for me, I’m moving on to the next pitstop on the neverending WATC(H)! Viva la fucking France, man.