Issue #1: The Trust

"Okay, you know the drill." Well, you will soon. We're all learning what this will be.

You came for Nicolas Cage, and you’ll get him. But not yet.

I’ve decided this is going to be more than reviews. More than four out of five stars or picking apart plot holes. More than, dare I say, Johnny Blaze himself.

This is Cinema UnCaged, and as such, we’re going to go beyond the movie. We’re going to explore, well, whatever piques my interest while watching the Nic Cage movie of the week.

[This week is the 2016 heist film The Trust, by the way. I rented it for $3 on Amazon Prime.]

So, without further ado, I’d like to tell you about Valerio Viccei. This real life bank thief was implicated in more than 50 robberies during his prolific career. He was described in press outlets as an Italian Playboy, although it seems like he was more accurately a piece of shit.

He was also gunned down by police at the age of 45 during a kidnapping or another robbery attempt (authorities aren’t sure) while he was technically still incarcerated in jail on the Adriatic coast serving a 22-year sentence. You see, in the Italian prison system he was able to leave his cell every morning and go do whatever he wanted as along he was back under lock and key at night.

Viccei, a silver-haired, sharp-suited figure looked like any other successful businessman in the town of Pescara.

But instead of being locked up in a maximum security jail like most criminals, Viccei was allowed to leave his cell at 7.45am every day to drive to his nearby flat in his pounds 25,000 Volvo S90. At the property he kept his other two cars, an Audi A3 and a Mercedes.

There he would change into one of his many designer suits before heading off to the office where he ran a small translation firm.

Once inside his rented second-floor office in the seaside town, he would check how business was going, make calls, read faxes, go through the post and visit new clients before heading off to his favourite restaurant for lunch.

And, as long as he was back in jail by 10.30pm for lock-up, prison officials were happy.

On his final day, a cop saw some suspicious activity and went to check it out, was fired upon and struck in his thigh, returned fire, bing bang boom. Next thing we know Viccei’s buddies flee the scene and dump his body along down the road.

So it goes.

During the height of his criminal reign, in 1987, Viccei and his five-man gang raided the Knightsbridge safe deposit center in London and made away with an estimated 62 million pounds after raiding more than 120 strong boxes. He and his pals entered the bank during business hours under the guise of opening their own deposit box. They then subdued the employees and the guards and robbed the place. He used a similar MO in many of his robberies apparently.

Viccei had managed to escape to South America at one point but was caught when he returned to England to retrieve and ship his Ferrari Testarossa. Must have had sentimental value.

You can read more about The Wolf here and here. There really is a lot more to the guy, including a brief period in politics, which he soon decided wasn’t worth it and just went back to robbing banks.

Alright, on to the feature film

Who knew that Nicolas Cage and Elijah Wood would be the perfect pair? Not the casting department, apparently. Wood was actually a replacement for Jack Huston, who dropped out with a scheduling conflict. Well, they get there in the end.

The Trust is a pretty run of the mill bad cop/bad cop heist movie, with some incredibly fun dialogue peppered throughout. The heist is somewhat reminiscent of Viccei’s big score in ‘87, as well. How’s that for some synergy for you?

I will say the ending is fairly clever and I genuinely chuckled at the final image, even if for macabre reasons.

The real value of The Trust comes between Cage and Wood’s interactions, specifically in scenes like the one Wood recounted during a recent episode of Hot Ones (it’s the show with hot questions and even hotter wings). Hear Wood talk about hot sauce and limes - and working with the Nicolas Cage - starting at the 5:10 mark:

I’m giving The Trust 3 1/2 Diamond-tipped Drill Bits out of 5.

[And, um, don’t watch this one with kids in the room.]

Related Movies I Love:

Inside Man

The Italian Job

Netflix Series To Check Out:

This is a Robbery miniseries

A Book I Was Reminded Of and Really Enjoyed:

The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and The Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson