Nicolas Cage gets another chance to go completely nuts in The Surfer, an endeavor good enough to make lovers of eccentric Cage performances happy.
Cage plays the title character, a successful businessman looking to move his family back to his childhood home in Australia. When he arrives with his son at the beach where he surfed in his youth, to surprise him with a potential beach-house purchase, a pack of evil surfer dudes restrict his access.
The Surfer refuses to leave, and things go all over the place from there.
The Surfer is waiting for the financing on his beach house—located on the gang-inhabited beach—to close. He winds up getting isolated, and his obsession drives him into a state of homelessness and living out of a car.
Director Lorcan Finnegan presents a puzzle movie where you can watch it with different mindsets. You can take it in as if the actions onscreen are all really happening—or you can see it like the Surfer is hallucinating as he becomes food-deprived and dehydrated. I like to see it more in the hallucinatory realm.
Either way, the movie is fun to watch. Cage is in fine delirious form.
And I still have no desire to ever go surfing in this lifetime.