The movie Stolen is kind of like…
Hmm. How does one describe the movie Stolen?
Let’s try this: The movie Stolen is kind of like Taken, but it stars Nicolas Cage instead of Liam Neeson. And instead of the main character being a former intelligence agent with “a particular set of skills,” the main character is “America’s greatest bank robber.” And instead of a gang of sex traffickers kidnapping the daughter, it’s a one-legged psychopath former accomplice who faked his own death. And instead of earning millions of dollars at the box office and spawning multiple sequels, it made $183,125 its opening weekend. And it’s set in New Orleans. During Mardi Gras. So it’s basically Taken, but terrible, with Nic Cage at Mardi Gras.
But that just tells you what the movie is. It doesn’t really give you the feel of it. It doesn’t get to its soul. What would help, I think, is an image. Perhaps a screencap. Perhaps this screencap.
That, for clarity, which is totally unnecessary, is Nicolas Cage manually resetting the bones in his hand after breaking a great many of them — on purpose — so he could slither out of handcuffs and escape from FBI custody. As one does.
We’re getting ahead of ourselves, though. Let’s back up.
Nicolas Cage plays a character named Will “Gum” Montgomery. As the movie opens, Gum and his crew are preparing to rob a bank in New Orleans, unaware that the FBI is lying in wait. The heist goes sideways. Gum ends up having to shoot a hotheaded member of his team — Vince, played by Josh Lucas, who we will very much come back to — in the leg to stop him from killing a witness, and then has to throw the money they stole into a conveniently located fire so he won’t have it on him when he gets arrested.
CUT TO: Eight years later. Gum gets out of prison. Some notes, in bullet point form, for the sake of brevity:
- Vince is dead now.
- The FBI is tailing Gum because they don’t believe he burned the money from the heist.
- His first stop is to see his daughter, after buying her the stuffed bear you see in the image at the top of this post, which is either a wink at Con Air or definitive proof that “Nic Cage brings a stuffed animal to his daughter after getting released from prison” is a whole genre of film now.
- Gum’s daughter hands him a package that was left for him and then hops in cab to go to her psychiatrist appointment.
- The package rings.
- Vince is alive.
- Vince was driving the cab and kidnapped Gum’s daughter because he also believes Gum hid the $10 million from the heist, and he wants his cut.
Also, Vince lost the leg Gum shot eight years earlier, and has transitioned from a run-of-the-mill hothead into a full-on murderous lunatic. He looks like this now.
This provides us with a good opportunity to stop and discuss Josh Lucas’ performance in Stolen, which is on such an upper level of bonkers that you probably need a personalized keycard to access it. He gives this speech about the history of New Orleans to one of his passengers — an Aussie bro who’s just announced that he wants to get his “donger dipped” — that is so nutty I don’t even know how to describe it. At one point he explains to Gum’s daughter that he faked his death by cutting off his fingertips and sprinkling them around a corpse he had dug up, chopped into small pieces, and burned, which would have raised questions like “But if he burned the rest of the corpse beyond recognition, wouldn’t his fingertips have been burned up, too?” and “Why didn’t the cops just use dental records?” if Lucas hadn’t immediately followed up the story with this, thus rendering everything else he said moot…
Let’s put it this way: It takes a lot to out-Cage Nicolas Cage in one of his movies. Travolta couldn’t even do it, and Travolta is a master. But Josh Lucas does it with ease in this movie. It’s actually kind of impressive.
But anyway, the FBI doesn’t believe Gum’s story about his former accomplice pretending to be dead for years as part of a slow-burning plan to kidnap his daughter and hold her for ransom when he gets released from prison in New Orleans on Fat Tuesday (seems reasonable to me), so Gum is on his own. It goes pretty much how you’d expect.
The result of it all is that Gum can’t find her in time and has to pull off another heist — an impromptu heist! — to get the money to get her back, since he really did burn that $10 million years ago. So he recruits his one surviving, sane former partner (Malin Akerman, whose character probably has a name) and proceeds to head back to the bank they robbed earlier and steal millions of dollars worth of gold by burning a hole in the bottom of the vault with a high-powered torch and letting the gold melt and drip down into the sewer, where they can collect it as it cools.
This is fun for two primary reasons
- One, the bank, which was robbed of $10 million eight years earlier, has apparently done nothing to add protection to its vault, or even change it. It’s still located directly above the sewer, and the big pile of gold Gum noticed the first time he robbed it is still in the exact same place. Come on, guys. At least try to not get robbed.
- And two, remember the thing from earlier about Nic Cage using one hand to break the bones in the other so he could slide the now-mangled blob through his handcuffs to escape from the FBI, and then using his bone-breaking hand to reset the bones as he walked away from the overturned car he escaped from? This gold heist happens after that. A one-handed impromptu gold heist! Which is very plausible!
As far as how they make their dramatic escape with the gold, I mean, I could explain it to you. Or I could just post this picture. I think it explains everything nicely.
So, yeah. Gum is off to meet Vince, with the gold, to get his daughter back. The meet is set up at an abandoned fairgrounds. As we all know, nothing good happens at an abandoned fairgrounds when you’re meeting the fingerless one-legged lunatic who stole your daughter and blames you for everything bad that happened to him over the past decade, so things begin falling apart quickly.
First, Vince gives a speech about how Gum ruined his life, and how Gum obviously loves his daughter, and it culminates with this truly remarkable moment in film history.
I was very much not joking about Josh Lucas’ performance in this movie.
And then, fire. So much fire. Vince heaves gasoline under the taxi in an attempt to burn the daughter to death, and it spreads, and Vince and Gum start fighting in and around the fire, and then they catch on fire, and then Gum jumps in the blazing car and stomps on the gas and drives the sucker straight into the river. And as he’s trying to save his daughter from the burning, sinking car — with a mangled hand — Vince comes splashing out of the water from behind and tries to kill him with a stick. And then other things happen, but we’re not going to talk about them because this is where Netflix went ahead and gave us an even better caption than “(resetting bone).”
Accurate and helpful! And a really funny thing to put on your tombstone if you want to freak out people walking through the cemetery!
You all see where this is headed, though. Gum kills Vince and lives happily ever after with his daughter in a trailer on the water. Which brings us to our closing points:
- Malin Akerman’s character drives to meet him at his trailer, and after she gets there he notices that one of the lumps of melted/solidified gold from their heist is still just sitting in the bed of her truck, which is hilarious because it means $200,000 worth of loose gold rock was just banging around back there for weeks and she was totally oblivious. Clean your truck, Malin Akerman! Geez!
- While all of this was going on — the gold heists, the FBI manhunts, the massive amounts of property damage caused by gunfire in the streets and government issue black sedans crashing and flipping around the French Quarter — the actual celebrating of Mardi Gras did not stop for a single second. The people of New Orleans remain strong and committed in the face of adversity. That might actually be the real theme of this movie.
Oh, and at one point a cab driver called Nic Cage “Tapioca” and I’m still laughing about it now. Stolen, good movie.
