Are Australians really the least hospitable people on the planet or is that just in the movies? Or is just me who thinks every Australian film features nothing but psychos, serial killers and the kind of weirdos you certainly don't want to run into when you decide to go surfing at a local beauty spot which is what Nicholas Cage as "The Surfer" chooses to do in Lorcan Finnegan's movie of the same name.
Arriving at the beach with his surfboard and son in tow Cage very quickly finds that as an outsider he is not welcome but being beaten up and robbed, (of his surfboard, phone, watch and car), doesn't deter our Nick who perseveres until what, they take his life as well? As a thriller, Finnegan's film doesn't stand up because it's all too far-fetched to ring true but then is any of this true or, like in Frank Perry's "The Swimmer", is it all in Cage's imagination and if it is, do we really care?
Maybe what "The Surfer" needed was an actor less associated with being crazy on camera, something Cage has made his speciality. Maybe what this movie needed was a Ralph Fiennes, an actor we might more closely identify with, (even if I can't see Fiennes on a surfboard). Unfortunately as Cage suffers everything God and the world can throw at him he not only loses it but his audience as well. In the end this never amounts to anything other than another Crazy Cage movie, a little more original in the telling perhaps than your usual multiplex fare but also both pretentious and hard to swallow.
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