LOS ANGELES, May 1 (UPI) -- Hollywood is full of tales of strangers in strange towns getting in over their heads, and Nicolas Cage has starred in several of them. The Surfer, in theaters Friday, is an intriguing iteration of that concept, though astute viewers will anticipate some of its surprises.
Cage stars as a man referred to only as The Surfer, who pulls his son, Charlie (Finn Little), out of school to show him Luna Bay, the Australian beach where he grew up. The Surfer hopes to buy the house his grandfather once owned, but soon learns locals led by Scally (Julian McMahon) threaten any nonlocals who try to surf at the beach.
Though his son returns both to school and home, The Surfer remains at the Luna Bay parking lot considering a way to stand up to the so-called Bay Boys and come up with more money to outbid another buyer.
While standing up to bullies is admirable, nothing The Surfer does has a reasonable chance of overpowering this gang of surfers. It can be frustrating to watch The Surfer dig himself deeper into a dangerous situation.
He is much slower to realize officer Cogan (Justin Rosniak) is on the Bay Boys' side than the audience will be. Still, it's fun to see how much this corrupt cop frustrates The Surfer as Cage displays some new facial expressions in response.
The bigger mistake is staying at the beach a full 24 hours and continuing to stay longer. Everything he does to resist the Bay Boys gives them the upper hand.
Once it is clear the locals at the beach are hostile, it is quite naive of The Surfer to keep asking locals for help. He is vulnerable, yet he turns down help from genuinely kind tourists and chooses further suffering, such as drinking dirty tap water, rather than give up.
Though frustrating, this is accurate to human behavior. Many people think they have all the answers despite the world frequently reminding them things are out of their control. Besides, if he learned his lesson quickly, there'd be no movie.
Earlier scenes make it clear The Surfer's obsession with the house has cost him his family, with his wife ready to remarry.
He tells her once he buys the house he'll have more time, but she would have rather had his attention and so would Charlie. He's on notice with his brokerage firm anyway, and still came up $100,000 short on the offer for the house after all that.
The sunk cost fallacy leads people like The Surfer to refuse to abandon their plans because they have already invested so much. Movies also tell people that if they just stick with it, they'll achieve their dreams like Rocky, Rudy (which was a true story) or the heroes of 8 Mile and La La Land.
Determination is an important quality within reason. There's ignoring naysayers and then there's walking into violence like The Surfer does.
Movies also like to punish their heroes to make them earn their victories, like Luke Skywalker and most of the heroes portrayed by Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis. Several days at Luna Bay prove things can still get worse for The Surfer.
Scally is a men's business coach who teaches a form of toxic masculinity where by submitting to suffering, he toughens them up for business. It is essentially a monetized form of fraternity hazing.
Yet The Surfer goes through a gauntlet and crucible himself. Whether or not it betters him is ultimately left up to the viewer, and even the best interpretation is a cautionary tale.
By the time he's spent 48 hours in and around his car on the beach, it's not a good look for realty or business. One wonders what his plan is at that point.
By day three, his clothes are dirty and he's claiming he's a broker about to close on a house. He seems as delusional as Cage's character Peter Loew did ranting "I'm a vampire" on the streets of New York in Vampire's Kiss, except The Surfer is telling the truth.
As much as The Surfer is operating on misguided righteousness, Cage also conveys his sympathetic side. He's watching a place that was once meaningful to him but has long since passed him by, clinging to what it used to be.
He describes growing up in Luna Bay beautifully, but the audience can see that experience no longer applies. He hasn't considered that if he does get the house, he'll be living with the Bay Boys the rest of his life.
Lorcna Finnegan directs The Surfer with a mostly straightforward style, but sometimes cuts in quick flashes of ominous foreshadowing. By the time the full context of those flashes is shown, those scenes are not necessarily the flashbacks or flash-forwards they might have initially appeared to be.
A few heightened effects capture The Surfer's distraught state. In one scene, locals gang up on The Surfer in a mockery reminiscent of the "They're all gonna laugh at you" vision in Carrie, and a fisheye lens further disorients The Surfer's most disheveled look.
Cage previously played characters in over their heads in the crime caper Red Rock West, the meme favorite The Wicker Man, the snuff film drama 8mm and even the comedy Trapped in Paradise. The Surfer is as unique as each of those, with the underlying theme that whether the hero succeeds or fails, he'd have been better off avoiding all the drama.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
