Sympathy for the Devil is a B-movie Collateral that swaps out a dyed-blonde Tom Cruise for a dyed-redhead Nic Cage.

And he’s satanic.

With a Cage-ified Masshole accent.

And replace Collateral’s Los Angeles setting for Offstrip, Las Vegas.

Which is to say, it’s one of my favorite Nic Cage movies (…a low bar) since ??

BUT, it’s one of my favorite Nic Cage performances — a high bar! — since ??

Sympathy for the Devil is also an example of a title that changes meaning as the movie progresses. 

At first, it feels like a pithy reference to the rock-and-rollness of Cage’s rolling stone of a satanic character, who the audience is liable to believe might be the actual Devil during his mysterious introduction.

But turns out, the phrase “sympathy for the devil” spoils — by doubling as a description of — the movie’s narrative structure, which begins by engendering the audience’s sympathy for Joel Kinnaman’s main character, only to ultimately reveal that his past shows him to be more of a devil than not.

The title also got me thinking about the Cage character’s relationship to the concept of the Devil. When he starts the movie dropping biblicalish quotes about God and Satan, they seem like proof of his off-his-rocker evil. But once we learn more backstory, it becomes clear that he resorted to clinging to this Good vs. Evil framework to make livable sense of his tragic reality (classic religiosity).

In other words: he may appear to be the Devil initially, but he still earns our sympathy, eventually.