Like much of Paul Schrader’s 21st-century work, Dog Eat Dog is a formal experiment more than a narrative feature. Its shot transitions are frenetic and effects-laden, and the frame is in a constant state of flux between camera formats and overall image stability. But the story captured in all this frenzy is almost a counterweight in its cavalcade of generic clichés, a bundle of textual signifiers with the loosest thread to connect them. So on-the-nose are the film’s reference points that Nicolas Cage, who plays the ringleader of a trio of hapless cons, spends the majority of the movie effectively honing a Humphrey Bogart impression.
Yet in Cage’s blunt homage is a skeleton key for the film’s charms. If the one-last-job crime movie has by now long passed into the realm of the elemental, the genre equivalent of a piece of classical music, the canonical nature of the basic plot now exists solely to monitor minute variations. Schrader understands this, as do his actors, who push their types past mere melodrama and into the realm of the soap opera.
Troy (Cage) is every two-bit hustler who is just that iota too smart for his own good, but we meet him as someone closer in emotional tone to Cage’s character in Raising Arizona: utterly clueless, a walking target for both cops and legitimately tough criminals. His running gang also consists of thumb-breaker Diesel (Christopher Matthew Cook), a refrigerator of a man that Troy nonetheless insists “In another universe, this guy could have been a lawyer from Stanford or something,” and Mad Dog (Willem Dafoe), a drug addict whose volatile mood swings oscillate between simpering affection and rabid violence. The latter kicks off the film getting high and watching infomercials before losing his temper and murdering his wife and stepdaughter. The emotional journey to that point, of Mad Dog screaming at a telemarketer, pathetically groveling at his partner’s feet, then glowing with rage as he dispatches his family, brings out the kind of unhinged, tragicomic mania that Dafoe is always credited with but usually only conjures with Abel Ferrara.
The three met in prison, but they reunite as drifting ex-cons who get by on low-level mischief. Schrader uses their escapades of cheap scores as an excuse to leap into all manner of visual mayhem, recalling Neveldine/Taylor in his moves in and out of black-and-white, the lurching and nauseating movement of the camera around the actors, the rainbow glitches that signal transitions between shots. There are numerous cuts that move cleverly on an action to eliminate in-between time, such as Diesel hitting on a woman in a bar before the camera abruptly cuts to just outside his hotel room as she rides him and Troy, standing in the adjoining room, closes the door in front of the camera. Antecedents for this kind of style include Go and Natural Born Killers, and Schrader gleefully adapts those films’ frenetic style into the digital age by compromising the image itself to create fauvist artifacts of compression in a bid to capture the characters’ libidinous mindsets and addled perspectives.
The film slows down and sobers up, however, when the trio get fingered to kidnap a mobster’s baby as collateral for unpaid debts. This is a suicidal job and they all know it, but instead of taking it for the usual reasons—enough money to “get away,” the narcotic lure of transgression, etc.—these men seem to take the task as if on autopilot, as if they knew that they were fated to do this and cannot mess with the order of the universe. Here things become lugubrious, but the characters also get some leeway to look inside themselves, and their introspection fits within a long tradition of revisionist crime movies in which the protagonists question not only themselves but seemingly the archetypes to which they belong. Dafoe in particular is greatly affecting as Mad Dog begins to take stock of the horror of his life and confesses his sins to his friends in a desperate bid for forgiveness. In his meek interactions with Diesel, he is sadly relatable, just a lonely and messed-up man looking for a friend.
So tender are moments like these that the final act, in which betrayal and the inevitability of doom rends apart the relationship between the men, is irritating due to the sudden and garish reversion to hackneyed plot devices. The firefights that close out the movie are emotionally varied—some wrathful, others sad and pitifully noble—but not even the sight of a deeply wounded Troy fully imbibing Bogie as she shuffles toward the end can redeem the pointlessness of it all. Still, if this is yet another postmodern offering from a writer-director who has become loose to the point of distension, Dog Eat Dog nonetheless finds some measure of pathos in its wretches. Like much of Schrader’s recent work, it never rises above the level of a failed experiment, but if he has lost the thread since his glory days, he at least doesn’t waste your time.
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