I watched Willy's Wonderland

 Originally written 2/17/21, published 4/27/21

And what a strange movie it is.

Just to throw some life into my very-quiet blog I figured I'd discuss some thoughts off the most recent Nicholas Cage movie, the direct-to-pay-per-view "Willy's Wonderland." Its runtime is an hour and thirty minutes, and currently costs about $20 to stream it on Redbox On-Demand, Prime Video, and several other sites, or about 20 minutes of your time if you decide to try and figure out how to pirate/unofficially stream the thing.

It's ok. I think I'd be doing any and all readers a disservice even in just saying what *isn't* in this movie, so if this looks like a fun movie you'd be interested in seeing, then consider this as a spoiler warning. You should be able to know where to find this film, and here's the trailer if you haven't seen that yet, so maybe check those things out first. Last warning!

Willy's Wonderland apparently ran on a budget of 5 million dollars, and in my experience, it showed. This review from The Irish Times pointed out the obvious in that almost the entire budget was probably spent on Nicholas Cage's contract and in securing the rights to using the Lynyrd Skynyrd song Freebird during a sequence towards the end. Another quick google search reported back that Nicholas Cage receives anywhere between 1 and 12 million dollars per film role, and an article from 2018 from Yahoo entertainment quickly comes up describing how Nicholas Cage has pivoted his career into taking Video-On-Demand acting roles to help pay off accumulated debts. I mostly knew of him from teachers back in middle school repeatedly playing the National Treasure movies on movie day, and I'm not really an expert beyond that.

What is mystifying however is that Nicholas Cage, for the full movie, doesn't feature a single speaking role. None. Somewhere when Googling this film I saw a hopeful fan considering this film as a cross between Five Nights at Freddy's and John Wick.

Why would this decision have been made? Nicholas Cage, from what I can tell, has the acting chops to elevate any script he's given. He apparently even has a producer credit on this film, so it should be assumed that he had a great amount of input on this creative decision. Could it have been more cost effective and saved Nick Cage from having to perform multiple line readings, in ensuring he has no dialogue? Maybe that's possible. Could it have helped film distribution, similar to John Wick, in that little dialogue needs to be translated in order to maket this film overseas? This sounds possible too, though it's worth emphasizing, many other characters seem to talk in place of Cage's character, which seems to poke holes in this theory...

For a film that intrinsically is marketing itself as a fun and cheesy "horror" movie with Nick Cage acting as the hero, it's incredibly stiff and serious and doesn't seem to leave any room for Nicholas Cage to act. Of course he's the main title credit, but he isn't even actually given a name in this movie, other than "The Janitor."

Willy's Wonderland notably stifles potential improv at another point as well, towards the beginning of the film when our legion of extended cast members--there's six of them by the way--break into a trailer to rescue the Main Supporting Girl (Liv, played by Emily Tosta), and one of these characters (Dan, played by Jonathan Mercedes) begins to recite a story on why he wants to see the ghost-possessed animatronics burn, but is immediately cut off by the main girl.

It's a shame. Movies that have ascended their modest or even shoestring budgets (like One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest as an example of a film with a somewhat-similar budget, or Night of the Living Dead as an even better example) tend to know when to play to their strengths, and fill time with very human and organic actions. In an otherwise pointless scene (included to perhaps attach us somewhat to new characters so that when they're put up against the upcoming scary main conflict, that we're scared for them too, and also to emphasize to us that the police officer lady is not-good), it could have at least felt less controlled and more fun. The feeling that comes off is that this movie is a pulp-horror movie that can't decide on if it wants to be pulp-horror.

Commenting back on the idea of Willy's Wonderland having an extended cast, Nicholas Cage faces no fewer than 8 animal-robots. It features an almost-nameless cast of six supporting characters (which is expanded upon somewhat later on) so we can revel in seeing them get picked off and killed, and we get 8 animal-robots so we can revel in a bunch of action sequences with Nick Cage.

Silent Nick Cage. Seriously. A grumpy and tough and illiterate Hispanic or Romanian guy might've been casted for the lead and it'd have hardly felt different (and may have been funnier.)

These were most of the thoughts that came to my mind in watching this film, but some minor criticisms--it is kind of a shame that sexual references and sexual scenes were in this movie. The ones that were included (and even the foul language) didn't add much to the film, and also, in effect, limits the audiences I at least would want to watch this around.

Also the handcuffs scene towards the half hour mark was a little stupid. Do these even look like real handcuffs? Sure there's no safety latch on them but they ought to be a little weighter, or maybe double-locking or something. When we are gratuitously shown the hairpin used to pick the locks, I fully expected this knowledge to be revisited later as a sort of trick one character remembers and uses to face a different situation, but this doesn't happen.

But, that's Willy's Wonderland. An action movie disguised as a horror film, a fun watch in its own right, but also a movie that you almost-immediately know what the ending's going to be as soon as you start it. Half of it seems to be just a silent Nick Cage cleaning up an abandoned Chuck-E-Cheese. It's still fun in some ways, and I found it worth my time, although I hardly find it worth a rewatch. It takes a concept that's *almost impossible to fail* and just barely pulls it off.

These were my impressions though, and by no means is this an all-encompassing analysis, so feel free to comment and let me know if you thought differently! Thanks for reading--be sure to keep an eye on this blog and my mirror blog for any future posts!

Rating: 5/10

Would I recommend this movie to a friend?: Sure. It teeters on being worthwhile and a lot of its entertainment-value is pretty surface-level, but it executes a unique concept in at least a passable way. Points are deducted out of feelings of missed potential but it should be an engaging film, at the very least.

Afterword: I sat on this blog post for an embarrassingly long time in part because, when posting this, the pictures would all jumble up, at least on Tumblr's end. Thanks for your patience, regular-ish uploads should be coming soon-ish. :-)

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