A little game for you. Read the following, and think of who could best personify such a monster: “When he grins, birds fall off telephone lines. When he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad, and your urine burns. The grass yellows up and dies where he spits. … He has the name of a thousand demons.”
Did you answer Christian Slater? Of course you didn’t. You thought of Al Pacino, or maybe Javier Bardem. Gary Oldman? But in the no man’s land of direct-to-video fare, you get Slater, the poor man’s Jack Nicholson, hardly an untalented actor but hopelessly miscast in portraying such devastating evil.
But then, most everyone involved in Dolan’s Cadillac is vastly out of their depth. Wes Bentley, the very poor man’s Tobey Maguire, can barely summon a passable hissy fit, let alone the rage of man whose wife was killed by Slater’s human trafficker. Director Jeff Beesley has done plenty of Canadian TV comedy work, but is nowhere near talented enough to capture any of the tension of Stephen King’s original short story. The ending, on the page a pleasingly ironic tale of revenge with healthy dollops of righteous anger, is, onscreen, kind of silly.
It’s best to look at Cadillac not as another DTV release, but as a guide to some of the best Canadian character actors working today. Greg Byrk (Immortals) would have made a far better Dolan; Aidan Devine (A History of Violence) classes up the joint; Eugene Clark (Land of the Dead) is always a commanding figure; and Emmanuelle Vaugier (Mirrors 2) is way too smart and classy to end up with a sad sack like Bentley. They all deserve better. —Corey Redekop