The Wicker Man

Here is a film regarded as terrible but turns out to be merely bad. That’s not a compliment.

Nicolas Cage plays a California Highway Patrol officer summoned to a remote island in Puget Sound by his ex-fiancée. Her daughter has vanished. The island is ruled entirely by women. Men labor in silence. It’s writer-director Neil LaBute’s twist on Anthony Shaffer’s 1973 script—instead of rejecting Christianity, this community rejects patriarchy.

LaBute made his name with In the Company of Men, a savage takedown of toxic masculinity that had the courage to indict everyone involved. Critics who called it misogynistic missed the point entirely. Here, LaBute swaps the original’s religious fanaticism for gender politics. The premise crackles with potential. The execution does not.

Let’s start with Cage. He excels at playing flawed everymen—consider his turn in Leaving Las Vegas. But this role demands an extreme, not an everyman. Give it to a Josh Brolin type, all swagger and machismo, and watch LaBute deconstruct him. Or cast a pushover and trap him in a nightmare where the audience confronts its own complacency with male dominance. Instead, Cage wavers between timid and aggressive, convincing as neither. You sense he and LaBute never agreed on who this man is.

Then there’s the bloat. The original ran 88 minutes. This one runs 102. Why must remakes always be longer? John Carpenter’s The Thing earned its expansion. This doesn’t. We get needless backstory, pointless subplots about self-help books, scenes that exist only to make us jump. Cage chases someone into a barn, climbs to a hayloft, falls through the floor. It adds nothing. It reeks of studio mandated pick-ups designed to goose the pacing.

LaBute, a playwright, should know better. Consider a throwaway moment: Cage leaves a voicemail, then says “Hello?” as his signal drops. Who’s he talking to? The machine? Was this lazy writing or LaBute unable to rein in Cage?

The original film understood that a trap picture must work like a whodunit. We shouldn’t see it coming, but when we do, it must feel inevitable. Here, we see it coming and it makes no sense. The conspiracy is so all-encompassing it becomes laughable. At least the unrated cut omits the theatrical release’s coda that tried to explain things but only doubled down on the inanity.

Still, there are flashes. A woman enters carrying a broom—nice witch homage. The location photography creates genuine foreboding. Ellen Burstyn, as the island’s matriarch, channels Christopher Lee’s menace from the original. In her first scene, she’s terrific.

Then there are the bees. The film’s calling card, for better or worse. The women trap Cage in a mask and pour in a swarm. He screams hysterically. It’s unintentionally hilarious, though the film establishes he’s allergic and they revive him with an Epi-Pen. Never mind that an Epi-Pen isn’t a cure—it buys time for real medical help. The CGI bees look terrible. The scene reveals LaBute’s discomfort with genre filmmaking.

That discomfort sinks the picture. LaBute plays the horror beats so over-the-top they become camp. The genre elements feel like obligations, not opportunities.

Still, The Wicker Man isn’t terrible. Certainly not the disaster its IMDb rating suggests.¹ It’s something sadder: a film that should have been as fearless and controversial as the original but instead feels tame. The ideas are there. The commitment isn’t. What we’re left with is Nicolas Cage in a bear suit, punching women, screaming about bees—a clip reel for the internet.

If only it were shorter.