Yuval Adler’s Sympathy for the Devil owes a great debt to Collateral. Michael Mann’s masterpiece bottles tension inside the cramped confines of a Los Angeles taxi cab. Devil substitutes Las Vegas for L.A. and the car of a man desperately trying to reach his wife giving birth in the hospital for a taxi driver. It also substitutes Jamie Foxx and Tom Cruise with Joel Kinnaman and Nicolas Cage.

Kinnaman takes on a similar—though less expressive and emotionally palpable—disposition to Foxx. Cage, on the other hand, replaces the icy composure of Cruise with his usual brand of wild-eyed mania. Cage’s psychopath, credited as “The Passenger,” sports dyed red hair and something vaguely resembling a generic Boston accent. He sips freely from a mini flash as he hijacks the car of David (Kinnaman) at gunpoint, sending them away from the hospital and toward an ill-defined objective in Boulder City.

It would be unfair to compare this film to Collateral, but the similarities in the premise are so apparent that it is difficult to watch Kinnaman and Cage without thinking about Foxx and Cruise. Foxx, for my money, gives his career best performance as Max. And Cruise’s performance is also sneakily one of his best, too.

As much as Cage has (rightfully) achieved appreciation for his on-screen persona, in which his characters are often pressure cookers that will fly off the handle spontaneously. Here, his “Passenger” talks of being “100% sex” and his wife urinating all over the delivery room while giving birth. He gives vicious glares to David and blows his top over cheddar cheese. Effectively unexpected as these outbursts are, Cage rarely comes off as menacing in the role. With Cruise’s Vincent unavoidably in my mind throughout Sympathy for the Devil, Cage can only hope to pale in comparison

Cage’s performance peaks during the film’s centerpiece sequence. In a roadside diner, the Passenger raises a hullabaloo over mozzarella cheese, loses all of his cool at the waitstaff and patrons, and sings “I Love the Nightlife” as he saunters back to the booth. Then, all hell breaks loose.

The scene is what most signing up for a Nicolas Cage film will be waiting for, and it also sports the film’s best filmmaking. Some finely edited business with a handful of Sweet’n Low packets escalates into a brawl accompanied by sparing slow motion and smooth tracking shots. It is a roughly 15-minute set piece that will likely be remembered more fondly than the film as a whole will be.

Aside from this sequence, Sympathy for the Devil is constructed rather conventionally—a fitting complement to a story which builds slowly toward unimaginative twists. Well before the dust starts to settle, it becomes apparent that the film has little more on its mind than its final reveal, which doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been done before (and better).

Sympathy for the Devil: C+

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Twitter, Letterboxd, Facebook)