The Surfer: a 'bonkers, sun-scorched psychodrama'

Nicolas Cage gives a 'gonzo' performance

(Image credit: Vertigo Releasing)

There's no film star quite like Nicolas Cage, said Jonathan Dean in The Sunday Times. During his untethered 40-year career, Cage has become the go-to actor for feverish madness tinged with melancholy – and in the Irish director Lorcan Finnegan's new thriller, he delivers "at full tilt".

This "unashamedly lurid and pulpy B-movie" is about a divorcee businessman (Cage) who returns to his native Australia after decades in California, hoping to buy the clifftop house in which he grew up, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. But when he takes his teenage son to the beach to try some surfing, he falls foul of the Bay Boys, an aggressive gang of local surfers who refuse to let these outsiders anywhere near the surf, and confine Cage to the car park. Humiliated and smarting, our hero resolves to take on the bullies – setting the scene for some fantastically trashy Cage-led mayhem in a film that touches on themes such as toxic masculinity, but has nothing profound to say about them.

Before long, the beta-male businessman has been "beaten, stripped of his every possession, sunburnt and psychologically broken to the point of mania", said Kevin Maher in The Times. And as his confinement seems to become "insuperable, the car park acquires symbolic significance, like purgatory". There are elements of Beckett too, with Cage as the "hopeless clown" forced to recognise the meaninglessness of his existence. Luckily, the 61-year-old star's "gonzo" performance rescues the film from such "pretensions". "The Surfer" is "ultimately Point Break on crystal meth", with Cage as the Keanu Reeves character, circling the surfer posse and "oddly beguiled by their feral charm"; and overblown as it is, this "bonkers, sun-scorched psychodrama" is tremendously entertaining.