Director: York Alec Shackleton
MPAA Rating: R
Runtime: 87 Minutes
It is a blessing and a curse that the Internet’s favorite actor, Nicolas Cage, is currently trapped in a say-‘yes’-to-literally-every-script phase of his career at least a decade after it peaked. Whenever a new one of his projects anonymously materializes onto a streaming service every month, those indoctrinated into the meme cult of Cage have to approach each of these spontaneous releases with a lot of reservation.
York Shackleton’s 211 at first seems like a promising premise, casting the mercurial Cage as a patrolman – weeks from retirement – who’s embroiled in a desperate struggle against a group of war-profiteering militiamen turned bank robbers. Even so, the potential always exists with these forgettable entries on Cage’s ever-expanding IMDb page that this could be a humble production for which his trademark craziness shines through or a paycheck, plain and simple, for the aging actor so that he may purchase more fossils.
211, to its credit, has the veneer of competency in how it sets the stage for the climactic bank heist standoff, which gives the film its title. There’s noticeable economic consideration for how all of the threads of Shackleton’s at-times-needlessly-convoluted script contribute to adding dramatic tension to the sprawling action set piece that takes up the greater half of the film’s closing acts.
After we are introduced to the four-man squad and how an industrialist has put the payment to their PMC in a holding bank, Shackleton wastes no time establishing his dramatis personae in rapid expository succession to ensure they all will somehow influence the bank heist that sold you the ticket in the first place.
I would call it a very film-school approach to a studio blockbuster heist film where the script feels so calculated, as if the metrics came straight out of the pages of “Your Screenplay Sucks!” If it weren’t so fatally lacking any personality and charm, I would have hoped it got Shackleton an A for his MFA program.
What would have made 211 more tolerable is if it were made several decades earlier. Not just for the sake of a younger and more sprightly Cage, who’d be able to enunciate his words much better than this checked-out Cage can, but also so that the sea of tired action film plot points from which Shackleton pulls would still have been relatively fresh.
Cage’s Michael Chandler is weeks away from retirement, and it would not surprise you to learn he is a widower; that his partner is his son in law; his daughter is expecting a child; and, on the day of the concluding standoff with the bank robbers, a wayward youth has been put into his care for the ride-along program.
Shackleton overloads his script with worn plot details to artificially ratchet up the tension, but he’s not ambitious enough to do anything with them then to play them straight. We have a fully formed narrative moving into the heist that will assuredly play with what it pangs itself to establish, but it rings hollow instead of sincere.
Who is Michael Chandler other than the most calculated TV-cop character to ever have graced the screen? Cage can’t and doesn’t attempt to breathe life into this propped-up list of cliched character motivations and performs without the pizazz or passion that endeared him to us. It’s incorrect to say he’s on autopilot for this performance because he still tries and even gets a scene to scream at his superiors in a strange broken cadence.
Sadly these appear to just be the flickering embers of an extinguished bonfire as the rest of the film attests to a tempered performative Cage who cannot raise 211 up from the television miniseries it feels like. This level of enthusiasm carries across all the bit players who Shackleton weaves around this besieged bank from the uppity branch manager who impishly challenges the militia on occasion to the troubled youth whose riveting plotline revolves around the wellbeing of his iPhone.
The action that the second half of the film embroils itself in is a rather illegible series of shootouts that get far too drawn out to be interesting. Shackleton appears to be a proponent of the digital-cinema approach to action films, which litters set pieces with disorienting artificial zooms and crosscuts that make charting his character’s locations in relation to space – and one another – a fool’s errand.
Chandler and the ride-along Kenny get separated in the parking lot while under fire, as a SWAT operations base is hurriedly put together to deal with the threat, and for the life of me I couldn’t tell where any of these people or things were geographically, relative to the focal point of the bank. His action becomes indecipherable, and all his attempts to install this tension from overprepping his script with dramatic bargaining chips fail accordingly.
211 proves itself to be of the lesser-spiralling Cage films that think his presence alone can elevate unremarkable, paint-by-numbers thrillers to cult-approved schlock. With (an assumed) five more Cage films expected to hit theaters or streaming services before winter, you’re better off gambling on one of those wildcards than with this run-of-mill heist film. Though tightly plotted, there’s not a hint of personality beneath the withered-cop setup that even causes the star to disappointingly reel it in.
