Sympathy For The Devil review: Meet your new Nicolas Cage memes

In 2013, it was mostly serious cinephiles who saw the movie Locke, in which Tom Hardy traverses the highways at night, trying to get to his mistress who’s going into labor. It’s pretty much a one-man show, with Hardy’s Locke taking calls to try to keep everything running smoothly as he’s stuck in transit. While watching the new movie, Sympathy For The Devil, one assumes director Yuval Adler (The Secrets We Keep) and writer Luke Paradise were among those who saw Locke, and thought, you know what this needs? Nicolas Cage in the back seat dressed like Satan.

They’re not wrong. A case could be made, in fact, that every movie needs that. With his rooster-red coif matching his jacket’s outer lining, and the rest of his ensemble as black as his goatee, Cage looks as close as a human being can to a Coop drawing, short of painting his actual skin red and attaching a tail. He’s not, unfortunately, playing a literal Satan, but you can bet the actor took most of his character creation cues from ol’ Scratch. Except maybe the Boston-ish accent that comes and goes (“My mutha. She’s dyin’ of cansah. Lung variety.”) The King of Hell is apparently a New England Catholic, at least in Nicolas Cage’s head.

Joel Kinnaman takes Tom Hardy’s place in the Locke-like role of David, driving through the less visually distinctive parts of Las Vegas to get to his wife, in labor again following a recent miscarriage. Almost there, and almost out of gas, he’s stymied when Cage’s devilish interloper invites himself into the back of his car and, after attempting a terrible card trick, pulls a gun and tells David to drive.

The passenger, whose real name we never learn for sure, won’t tell David what he’s up to, but he gleefully baits a traffic cop into a bloody death just to make the point that he’s nutty, armed, and dangerous. He also does everything you’d expect Cage to do, whether you know it or not. He squawks like a bird. He sings along to Alicia Bridges’ 1978 disco classic, “I Love The Nightlife,” on a jukebox. He does an impersonation of Edward G. Robinson (you know, for the kids). He screams in people’s faces. He tells childhood stories about an imaginary sinusitis-inducer named the Mucus Man. And in a moment destined to be memed forever, he loudly and lengthily yells “SIIIIT THE FUUUUUUUCK DOWN!” Cage may hate that people quote his over-the-top moments out of context, but since this entire movie is one, you can’t really take any of it the wrong way.