The Surfer (2024) Review

I seem to spend an awful lot of time on this website talking about Nic Cage, but then again Nic Cage makes an awful lot of films so I guess its inevitable.

As I and others have said before, some of his movies are good and some of them are bad. Some of them are so awful they instantly start to rot your mind, but they are always at least interesting so thats why I for one keep watching them.

The Surfer is his latest and much like Longlegs, my primary advice is for anyone interested in it is to ignore all of the marketing immediately. The cult of Cage, Cage Rage, Caged Madness or whatever else you want to call it is now seemingly the primary tool used to sell all of the films made by the man whose birth name is Nicolas Kim Coppola, and who once had to return a tyrannosaurus skull that he bought back to Mongolia –  to name just two random things about him.

Much like the campaign for Osgood Perkins so so thriller, too much focus is forced on to how crazy and unhinged the actor’s performance is, regardless of the percentage said intense insanity makes up within the movie – spoiler: Not much!

The definitive answer to if ‘Nicholas Cage is a genius or a joke’ (perfectly discussed in the Community episode Introduction to Teaching) has yet to be given, but nowhere has this stupid and simplistic style of advertising been more insulting than for The Surfer. And this is made weirder given it is the actors balanced and emotional turn which is the only thing worth watching the film for.

Surprisingly set in Australia, Cage plays an uninspiringly named character called ‘The Surfer’ who starts the film with his son, lazily named ‘The Kid’ (Yellowstone’s Finn Little), attempting to surf on the waves of Luna Bay where he grew up.

Unfortunately things have changed since The Surfer has been away and the sea and sand are now controlled by the belligerent and xenophobic Bay Boys, whose menacing motto is “Don’t live here, don’t surf here.”

After an uncomfortable and aggressive confrontation which leads his son to leave, Cage hangs around the forbidden area. Driven ny outrage at the unjustified hostility he has been met with and intrigue at the cult-like gang of locals and their leader Scally (Nip/Tuck and Charmed’s Julian McMahon), a charismatic chauvinist who seems to have everyone in the area under his command.

In the midst of purchasing his old house overlooking the water, The Surfer spends his time not surfing but making phone calls to his money man, spying on the Bay Boys and meeting locals who fall into one of two categories; very rude or very weird.

Enduring various indignities, assaults and insults from the first category, he ends up losing his surf board, then his shoes, then his Dad’s watch and then even more. He also spends time with someone from the second category, an old homeless man who is as obsessed and embittered with Scally and the Bay Boys as The Surfer himself is becoming.

As time passes Cage’s character morphs from a smart suited stress-free father, set to move back into his childhood home, to a bruised and bloodied, ranting, sun burned, rat eating madman, mocked by all and with no support. Is he losing his mind? Is he losing his identity? Will he ever get to surf? The more pressing question is: will you give a shit?

Although Cage is excellent throughout, after a simplistic setup The Surfer sits in a boring depressing rut while we watch Cage’s character bullied by a bunch of nasty Aussies whose racist and sexists lifestyle seems to have insidiously affected the entire area.

Although McMahon also gives a good turn, we have seen all the elements of this story too many times in a ton of survival horrors and revenge movies… where a raft of different urbanite out of towners take on the local bully boys and bring order to the masses celebrating colonisation and ousting otherness.

Directed like a pretentious film school project, littered with random cutaways of wildlife and people acting oddly to an over-dramatic score, it becomes apparent quite quickly that Lorcan Finnegan and writer Thomas Martin have no idea what they want to say or even really do with Cage or the film in general. This is a huge problem, especially when The Surfer portrays such odious levels of toxic masculinity and at times seems to be overtly celebrating it.

The biggest failure of The Surfer however is it fails to deliver either an entertaining cathartic action-packed third act, or any sort of enlightening or intelligent comment on what we or Cage have experienced. Added to that, the climax is as wet as the suits everyone is wearing. I guess at least you finally get to see some surfing.

All in all, there is very little to recommend here. You can see Nic Cage playing the same sort of role in a myriad of his movies, but most recently in Pig and Mandy, which are both hugely superior films made with skill and packed with interest and action, unlike this.

And after all that if you really still want to watch a surf movie, I would recommend Point Break (the original of course!)

Movie Rating:

The Surfer trailer

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