Oh for God's sake.
First, with regards to Nic Cage, even in his terrible films he's a joy to watch. The dude brings the same enthusiasm to Knowing and Ghost Rider as he did to Wild at Heart, Leaving Las Vegas and Raising Arizona. "Renaissance" was an awful word to use considering that Lord of War and The Weather Man weren't particularly bad films, just mediocre, but Bad Lieutenant is a fantastic film and his performance in it is as riveting and idiosyncratic as his roles in Adaptation were. Cage imbues each character with a personality, and it's usually
their personality - the dude in Next takes on an attitude of grim determinism as the movie plays out, while the titular Bad Lieutenant is a lurching, amoral menace who is nevertheless focused on getting to the bottom of a case. Even in a movie as bad as Knowing, he's great. He becomes obsessed with the numbers, and that obsession bleeds into everything. There's an excellent scene where he rolls down his car window to look at something, except it's an automatic window so he remains perfectly motionless. But besides being a funny extension of the character's obsessive attributes, it's just a wonderful piece of physical levity.
Cage is a self-aware dude - he knows how funny his roles can be, and has said in interviews that scenes like the one in Wicker Man where he just straight-up punches a woman while wearing a bear suit is obviously going to be pretty funny. I guess if you don't like that it's your loss, but to be really cynical about someone who's on the screen having fun playing make-pretend seems counterintuitive to part of the reason that we go to movies, which is to revel in the joy of the filmic medium. Shit gets goofy in movies sometimes, and Cage invites us to enjoy the way things get goofy.
Also for real who gives a shit about the goofiness of his hair when Bad Lieutenant has one of the most brilliantly written, edited and performed interrogation scenes in movie history? The shot where the old ladies enter the room and Cage, hiding behind the door, pushes the door shut and begins to shave is absolutely incredible, and the scene only gets better from there. Nathan Rabin, who I'll quote here, does the scene better justice than I could:
Nicolas Cage catches a lot of flak, much of it deserved, for squandering his talent on vacuous Jerry Bruckheimer productions and just-plain-foolhardy ventures like The Wicker Man, and his ostentatious style has won him more mockery than admiration of late. But I’ve always had a soft spot for hammy, late-period Cage, just like I have a soft spot for hammy, late-period Al Pacino, whose sublime preening livened up a couple of New Cult Canon entries in The Devil’s Advocate and Glengarry Glen Ross. I’d submit the spectacularly overheated scene above as Exhibit A in any argument for Cage’s merits, because he brings so much more to it than could possibly be suggested on the page. (Though if he’s responsible, kudos to Finkelstein for letting Cage castigate an old woman and her caretaker with the immortal line “You’re the fucking reason this country’s going down the drain!”) A few of my favorite touches: Cage appearing from behind the door, shaving with an electric razor, which projects an odd menace while suggesting how long he’s gone without sleeping or bathing; the four times he slaps the nurse’s hand (and the scolding, almost motherly way he does it) whenever she reaches for the oxygen line; and the way he works himself into a lather the longer he’s in the room. You’d expect common decency would shame him into apologizing for going Jack Bauer on a little old lady, but he just gets madder and madder and madder.
His hair looks ridiculous, but his character is played without restraint, without fear and without anything except sheer dedication to the character, the scene, and the film. As such you have a number of shots and scenes that emerge as remarkable, plot threads that interweave beautifully, and the sensation that the personality tying everything together is singular and remarkable and cohesive. It's an absolutely mesmerising film.
I'll readily admit that he sucked in Bangkok Dangerous, but that's because no amount of enthusiasm could have possibly saved that movie. It was a well of suck. Just like sometimes casting that seems dumb turns out to be great, casting that should save a shitty film won't necessarily keep it from sinking. That doesn't make Bad Lieutenant any worse, just like the Rock's role in Southland Tales doesn't make his role in Race to Witch Mountain any better.
As for the casting of Cera, everyone's calling it based on the typecast perception of the dude rather than what he's doing, and a couple of scenes in the trailer, which really don't look all that bad - the bit with him crushing the cup is pretty funny, and he seems frustrated but not Cera-stereotypically flustered when explaining to Ramona Flowers that he isn't a huge fan of dudes trying to kill him for dating a lady. Most of all, I've read Scott Pilgrim and frankly I don't really think anything Cera does in the trailer is a bad interpretation of the character. Maybe it's not exactly what you had pictured in your head but if the Twilight people can get over their mental image of Edward surely you can do the same, especially if it winds up being an accurate rendition of the character's traits, you know?
I'm not a huge fan of the Kantian notion of disinterest but the piling on of hate on this dude because of whatever rep he's earned rather than his role in a given film is pretty fucking tiresome. If I have to point out the obvious problems with this in a grating manner so that we can collectively stop having a knee-jerk reaction to
seeing an actor then I'll goddamn do that. It's unseemly. If you don't like him fine whatever but I'm honestly sick of people climbing all over each other to declare him a shitty dude when he's done fine in a lot of work, from Arrested Development all the way up through Youth in Revolt, in which his performances were actually some of the most solid work in the movie.
In summary, there's a few hundred words, I should have been studying but instead I decided to post a bunch of stuff, everyone should collectively just relax about
x person's involvement with
y thing before freaking out over how It's Ruined Now, etc. etc. etc.