Review of Joe (2014) by Brandon F — 28 Jun 2014

It's almost as if Nicolas Cage saw Mud and thought, "Yeah, I'm going to make that same movie, and with that same kid.".

The movie is set in the dirty, white trash South and follows the story of a young boy played by Tye Sheridan who comes from a broken, dysfunctional family. He makes acquaintances with mysterious man with a three letter name who later becomes his friend and mentor. He then gets caught up in the middle of a standoff between the man and a band of ruthless criminals whom the man has a violent history with. Wait, which movie was I talking about again, Mud or Joe?

While I'm probably not correct in assuming that Joe directly ripped off of Mud, it's quite difficult to ignore the striking similarities, especially since one of the trailers shown before the movie on the DVD was for Mud. Also Winter's Bone, another Southern white trash movie with an abusive father...from 4 damn years ago.

Aside from being uncannily similar to Mud, Joe is still a pretty decent movie on its own. It's easy to forget that Nicolas Cage is a legitimately good actor sometimes because he's become known for being in garbage direct-to-DVD action thrillers and yelling at everything. Movies like Joe challenge him to be more restrained and subtle with his performance, and while there are a couple of typical Nicolas Cage freak out moments, he still manages to maintain a level of grounded realism to his performance that we don't see from him too often lately.

Tye Sheridan is great in this film as well, giving a more mature and adult performance than he did in Mud. He truly shows off his range and is definitely going to be a strong actor in years to come. However, the stand out of the film is Gary Poulter who plays Tye Sheridan's alcoholic, abusive father. The most chilling and haunting thing about this guy is that he was an actual alcoholic, homeless person in real life, and shortly after shooting this film he was found dead. After knowing all of that information, watching his performance in this film is truly disturbing and horrifying because of how tragically authentic his performance is.

The film has a couple of pacing issues, it is very slow and a little bit longer than necessary. There are some scenes that don't really even flow with the sequence of events as they play out. For example, there's a scene somewhere in the middle where Joe and the main villain have a violent confrontation in a bar; the very next scene, Joe takes his dog to some girl's house and has him kill her dog while he gets a blowjob from her upstairs. It's almost like in a video game when you take a break from the main storyline to go do some random unrelated side quest.

While it may be strikingly similar to Mud and have a few pacing issues, Joe is an interesting film with several brilliant performances which make it worth watching.