As will happen when two guys are rooting through the same cinematic dumpster long enough, Nicolas Cage and John Cusack are bumping shoulders again. Last we saw these two gnawing at the same scraps was in 2013, when they appeared in the direct-to-video thriller The Frozen Ground. Now, three years later, they’ve reunited for Arsenal, a film that looks roughly as memorable as its title.
Not entirely surprisingly, the movie stars Adrian Grenier. He plays a construction worker who has to go up against a mobster when his brother gets in some drug trouble. According to the synopsis, Cusack plays “a plain clothes detective,” which is a euphemism for him wearing the same brought-from-home John Cusack uniform he wears in all of these bargain-bin crime thrillers (black cap, black pants, dark shirt-jacket—looks like an unemployed communist). Cage plays the mobster and, for whatever fucking reason, he’s done up like Andy Kaufman’s Tony Clifton character. He also decided to put on a fake nose. It’s extremely distracting and altogether baffling, but still, sort of nice to see him putting in some effort, however misguided.
Arsenal gets dumped in theaters January 6. But, if we’re being real here, it will also definitely be available on-demand that day.
