Richard Kelly’s first feature film, Donnie Darko, was pretty off the wall, and a little bit of a mess, but generally it was well-liked by most people who saw it. His next couple of films, Southland Tales and The Box, however, saw Kelly take his ambitions even further, and resulted in films so strange and confusing that not many people could get behind them.
Then you have Nicolas Cage, who’s pretty much the king of being so strange and confusing that people can’t get behind him. Seeing as he’s an ambitious artist much like Kelly, people have called Cage’s performances ill-conceived, awkward, or just plain awful, but nobody has ever accused him of being boring. And every once in a while you get that one that he knocks completely out of the park.
Kelly and Cage are two combustible creative elements, so, even if the results turn out awful, it should still be great fun to see what they produce when they get together. In what may be the most terrifying actor/director combination since Cage teamed up with Werner Herzog, Variety is reporting that Cage and Kelly are all set to collaborate on a crime thriller called Amicus.
Based on the real life of Motown Records exec Lawrence Horn, Amicus tells the story of how Horn earned himself a life sentence in prison for hiring a hitman named James Perry to kill his wife, their disabled son, and their son’s nurse, so that he could inherit his son’s $2m trust, which stemmed from a medical malpractice suit.
Apparently this isn’t the whole story, however. Horn’s eventual trial took five years to hash out, due to a series of shocking and strange developments. Cage will be playing a First Amendment attorney named Rodney Smolla who the families of the victims hired to consult on the case.
So, there you have it, the ambition of Kelly, the craziness of Cage, and a crime story full of five years worth of twists and turns, all coming together on the same project. Amicus sounds like a movie that’s going to be pretty hard to ignore.