The Trust Nicolas Cage, Elijah Wood, Sky Ferreira. Directed by Alex Brewer and Benjamin Brewer. Rated R. Available May 13 on Video on Demand.
Given how prolific Nicolas Cage is (he has five movies set for release in 2016) and how much time he spends in Las Vegas (his current primary home base), it was probably inevitable that he’d end up starring in a low-budget Vegas-set production. The good news is that The Trust is better than both the typical Cage direct-to-VOD quickie and most of the recent movies set in Las Vegas. Of course, surpassing Cage obscurities like Pay the Ghost and The Runner or pandering Vegas showcases like Last Vegas and Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 isn’t exactly a huge achievement, and The Trust is too uneven to qualify as a complete success. But it’s still a solid choice to dial up on VOD on a slow weekend, with enough distinctive touches to offset its familiar heist narrative.
Cage is responsible for many of those touches, with one of his more delightfully offbeat performances as unhinged Las Vegas cop Jim Stone, a schlub working in the evidence department (an area of police work underrepresented in movies and TV). Disrespected by their cop peers, Stone and his fellow evidence officer David Waters (Elijah Wood) decide to take advantage of their discovery that a criminal organization has hidden an apparently vitally important safe in an old rundown grocery store. The first half of the movie, as Stone and Waters go to odd lengths to get info about the criminal operation, is funny and inventive, with directors Alex and Benjamin Brewer making clever use of music montages.
The second half, as Stone and Waters get down to the grim business of the heist, which involves breaking into an adjoining apartment and taking one of its residents (Sky Ferreira) hostage, is less entertaining, as much of the humor is replaced with bloody violence. Cage remains predictably unpredictable to the end, though, and Wood serves as a solid straight man. The plot sets up too many intriguing questions that it fails to answer, but the dissatisfying resolution is topped by a visually striking coda, another grace note in a movie that’s all about adding weird little flourishes to a conventional genre story.
