I’m crestfallen about Paul Schrader‘s Dog Eat Dog — a lurid, blood-splattered genre satire. It’s not that I don’t get the fuck-all, porno-violent attitude. I just don’t understand how or why a good fellow like Schrader would succumb to this kind of gaudy nihilism with such mystifying gusto. He’s taken a 1997 Eddie Bunker crime novel, which I haven’t read but is reputedly grounded in brutal reality, and made a dark, sloppy comedy of excess that only the animals will like and which only Cannes critics will praise with a semi-straight face.
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Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe in Paul Schrader’s
Dog Eat Dog.
The Guardian‘s Peter Bradshaw has called Dog Eat Dog Schrader’s “best work in years…lairy, nasty, chaotic…Willem Dafoe is great.”
Dafoe’s performance as an imbecilic loose cannon named Mad Dog is in fact awful. Awful. Over-acting, desperate, flailing around. As a longtime Dafoe admirer I was embarassed for the guy. C’mon, man!
I’ll admit that Dog Eat Dog hits the amusement button maybe three or four times (Schrader’s dry performance as a crime lord is one of the few elements that satisfy) but mainly it’s a clumsy, splattery, tonally-chaotic wallow. I know it sounds unkind but the words “diarrhea dump” came to mind as I sat in the balcony this morning.
It doesn’t even feel professional half the time, and then at other times it feels relatively sane and well-measured and reflective of how some people process reality and how they actually behave, and then it goes off the rails again. If it hadn’t been directed by Schrader and hadn’t costarred Dafoe and Nicolas Cage it would be a bottom-of-the-barrel market film that nobody would even blink at.
It’s as if the finance guys said to Schrader, “Okay, we know you were enraged about what happened with Dying of the Light so you can have final cut, no problem, but we want a movie that the ‘international audience’ will enjoy. And by that we man the dumbest guys in New Delhi and Beijing and Seoul. We want chaotic fuck-all cynicism times ten. None of that subdued art-house Schrader stuff. We want depravity-plus…your characters blowing heads off, snorting coke, stabbing fat women in the back. And we also want you to totally torpedo what’s left of your exalted reputation. If you’re willing to do this, we’re prepared to sign the check right now.”