Car-Bound Thriller Sympathy For The Devil Is a Dull Trip

One may assume that a surefire way for a film to ratchet up the tension is to confine the proceedings to a single location. Amidst the claustrophobia of an enclosed space, we watch as small grievances bloom into vendettas and people are pulled towards confrontation with dramatic inevitability. Perhaps an ornamental gun is shown, alluding to a future act of violence, or maybe we witnessed hints of suppressed animosity that could burst forth at the worst time. Either way, these kinds of lean narratives tend to slowly raise the temperature until their boiling contents spill over. 

By contrast, Sympathy for the Devil, a car-bound thriller from director Yuval Adler, fails to arrive at this kind of explosive denouement, making it less a high-octane joyride and more a run-of-the-mill traffic violation. While most of the story takes place in a constrained setting and it wastes no time in introducing us to the dangers of being trapped in a metal box with a delirious Nicolas Cage performance, Sympathy for the Devil’s inability to paint its characters in anything but the broadest strokes makes it difficult to see past the artifice of it all, dulling its attempts at dangling these people’s fates over the precipice.

David Chamberlain (Joel Kinnaman) is on his way to visit his pregnant wife in the hospital, who is expected to give birth any minute. He is wearing a checkered flannel and a pair of glasses that make him look like the platonic ideal of an American everyman. As he heads to his destination, he drops his son off and justifiably frets over the condition of his wife. On cue, she calls to remind him of her first pregnancy, where the child didn’t survive due to complications. David nervously works through the contents of a pink hospital baby bag as he makes his way through the traffic of a Las Vegas night, and surprisingly, he arrives at his destination with time to spare. But while waiting for a parking spot, a strange man, who has been watching from the entrance of the emergency room, leaps into his car. Clad in a garish red blazer and equally affronting maroon hair dye, this figure (Nicolas Cage) pulls out a revolver and tells the stressed-out father to start driving. For the remainder of the movie, David attempts to escape the clutches of this Man in Red, as a potential past link between the two begins to emerge.

Although the decision to almost immediately put the protagonist in peril seems like it would set the stage for a white-knuckled standoff. Instead, it mostly reveals the clever construction of other, more successful one-room thrillers. Many of the best pictures in this style weaponize the threat of something going wrong to build anxiety, so that when things finally break bad after an agonizing buildup, this lands with the appropriate sense of crashing anticipation. Sympathy for the Devil begins at a fever pitch, and its attempts to raise the temperature further fall flat. We can feel the tension dissipate as the kidnapping prolongs, and even as this Man in Red (referred to in the credits as “The Passenger”) begins to hurt people, these hastily introduced characters come across as props meant to jolt our dull protagonist instead of individuals we become invested in. Less can often be more, as Locke, another movie that takes us on an extended drive, can attest. While that film lacked a devilish backseat driver waving around a firearm or any other sense of imminent physical danger, it managed to draw us into the collapsing personal life of its main character because it communicated the intricacies of his relationships and obligations, something that Sympathy for the Devil fails to do until its conclusion.