There was a point there when it looked as if Nicolas Cage had gone AWOL and would not be turning out for Joel Schumacher's home invasion thriller. Happily though, at least for Schumacher, it all got worked out, and the evidence is before our very eyes this morning, with the trailer for Trespass, in which Cage co-stars with Nicole Kidman.
Schumacher's film has nothing to do with Walter Hill's 1990s action classic, but like Ice T and Ice Cube, Cage still has to deal with a greedy ass cracker comin' in his hood with his hand out. Cage has a very large safe in his house, and shots of piles of money and mention of diamonds lead us and the balaclava'd villains ("troopin' with the ski mask, gotta get the cash") that break in to believe that there's much of value inside. It needs Cage's thumb-print to open it, but as lead bad guy Cam Gigandet points out, that thumb needn't still be attached to Cage to be of use.
There's not much here to explain quite what the thrust of the film is, beyond Cage's Straw Dogs glasses and his Straw Dogs mad-as-hell worm-turning. But there's reason to believe that there's more to the crime than simple random chance, and we're promised that it brings to light some unexpected relationship issues between the two leads. Has one betrayed the other? We couldn't possibly speculate.
Trespass performed poorly at test screenings and re-shoots have apparently tweaked some crucial issues. Will this be the film to end Schumacher's recent run of mediocrity? We'll start to hear when its released in the US on October 14. We don't have a date in the UK yet.