Cowabunga! ‘The Surfer’ is a sunbaked Cage match

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“The Surfer” is the kind of Nicolas Cage movie we’ve been getting a lot of lately – the kind that’s mostly about Nicolas Cage rather than any character he’s signed on to play. The Cage brand in all its gonzo dedication – the baroque line readings, the tireless work ethic, the fascinating lack of discernment in choosing projects – has become a selling point, especially to a younger generation of fans who worship his go-for-broke spark as a badge of honor and a beacon of honesty in a corrupt, corporatized entertainment culture.

They aren’t necessarily wrong, but I wonder if “The Surfer” might be a better movie with a different lead actor – one less rewarded for catering to his own outlaw mythology. The movie’s a male-meltdown special about a bourgeois prat trying to get back to his roots and instead being humiliated by a crew of beach thugs; set in Australia, it starts out in “Straw Dogs” territory before venturing into a surreal, parodic meditation on masculine identity and Tony Robbins-style men’s movement booshwah. It is, in other words, a LOT, even before you airlift Cage in like a Method-acting maraschino cherry on top.

The star plays “The Surfer” – the script by Thomas Martin doesn’t give him any other name, so you know he’s supposed to be, like, *iconic* – who, when the movie opens, is trying to get back to the beach in the most desperate way possible. A businessman with a failed marriage and a failed life, he’s arrived at remote Luna Bay – the film was shot in Western Australia, south of Perth – to buy back his childhood home above the dunes and get in a day on the waves with his estranged teenage son (Finn Little). (Cage’s American accent gets explained with a throwaway bit of dialogue that doesn’t convince; wherever this character is from, it’s away.)

“Oy! Locals only! Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” father and son are warned by a hulking beach boy (Alexander Bertrand), and our hero’s attempts to force the issue only bring down further wrath from the gang headed by the smooth-talking Callahan (Julian McMahon), who oozes a silky, vicious misogyny. After the son heads back home, the Surfer becomes marooned in the beach parking lot miles from anywhere, forced to sleep in his power-drained EV while his yuppie accoutrements – cellphone, watch, shoes, surfboard, pride – are stripped from him over the course of several days.

Everyone seems in on the conspiracy of his unmanning: a nearby cop (Justin Rosniak), a food truck proprietor (Adam Sollis), the local real estate agent (Rahel Romahn), a lady with a dog (Nina Young), a trio of underage surf punks. By day three, the Surfer has been reduced to a gibbering wreck, and if you expect a Nicolas Cage rage tantrum to rise phoenixlike out of the character’s twitching self-abasement, you do not have long to wait. I fully anticipate the frenzied phrase “Eat the rat!” will enter the Cage lexicon just behind “Oh, no, not the bees!” (from 2006’s “The Wicker Man”) and the actor’s whole-body recitation of the alphabet in 1988’s “Vampire’s Kiss.”

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But, see, “Vampire’s Kiss” had a sense of tragedy to go with the freak show – an obnoxious but insecure young man losing himself to madness – while “The Surfer” has a lot of ideas and not quite enough sense to go with the sensation. The director, Lorcan Finnegan, is an Irish up-and-comer in the New Horror school – his 2019 “Vivarium” won a distribution prize at Cannes – and I’m betting he has seen 1971’s “Wake in Fright,” a notorious Australian cult movie about an outback town steeped in macho devolution. That film is genuinely sweaty, weird and frightening, whereas “The Surfer” feels overthought and underwritten, a cacophony that builds to an undeserved power chord of acceptance, transcendence and retribution.

Anyway, any filmmaker casting Cage these days risks outsourcing the weird without doing the work themselves. The actor’s performances can feel of a piece with coherent works of craziness like “Mandy” (2018), “Pig” (2021) and “Longlegs” (2024), less so in a boilerplate studio thrill ride like “Renfield” (2023) or the self-reverential “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” (2022), in which Cage plays Cage (or the public’s idea of Cage) in a movie that disappears up its own tail. In “The Surfer,” he never seems more than a guest star hired to ride the wave of gonzo. And while his fans will get what they came for – eat the rat! – the rest of us are stuck in the undertow.

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Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.

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RATING: **1/2