I’ve taken a bit of a break on doing these for the past month or so, partially because it was the holiday season and partially because there haven’t been many trailers released (at least not anything that has sparked my interest in writing a breakdown). I even started to write about the new trailer for Mortal Engines but found myself clutching at straws after the first 100 words. But today, I watched a trailer that spoke to me on a whole new level. My god, does the trailer for Mom and Dad look amazing. Not amazing in the good sense, but amazing in the sense that this movie looks absolutely nuts.
The trailer opens with your average Joe suburban family bickering over breakfast.
Teenage Girl: “Can I go to the movies with a boy?”
Younger brother: “Ooooh, a boy.”
Mother: “No, your grandparents are coming over to dinner tonight.”
You know your regular, bland, boring-as-crap real-world problems, obviously written masterfully with top-notch execution. Wait, is that Nicholas Cage as the Dad? This may actually get interesting. I wait in anticipation to see what his first line is going to be, with him proceeding to tell his son, “Take my advice—don’t ever have kids.” What a good start Nic, you tell that eleven-year-old child you wish he had never been born!
Wholesome family hijinks ensue until Cage is struck hard in the back of the head by his son with a ball. He turns sharply and glares back at his son, the hatred seems to be flowing through him for this kid. Then flashing on the screen, we have a title card reading “They brought you into this world” just before we see the kids at school who are soon been chased down by a mob of parents Walking Dead style, intercut with title cards of “Now” and “They’ll”. They’ll what? Seriously… what? The answer doesn’t come from the title cards, instead, we get an exposition rich news report detailing that parents are murdering their children. From here, the trailer derails into a montage of kids running and screaming and parents chasing them, with our main characters stuck in their home hiding from Nicholas Cage-Dad and the Mum. Throw in a few zingers and it’s all pretty stock standard (well, as stock standard as you can get with a story like this). But there is one nugget of gold in amongst all of the cheese: we get a glimpse of peak Nicholas Cage screaming the hokey pokey whilst sledgehammering everything around him. This man is a glory to behold.
This film looks mental—and the trailer highlights it. It gives us peak Nic Cage in what looks to be his Cagiest performance in a long time. He said that this has been his favourite movie in the past ten years to film, and if that isn’t an endorsement of how mental something is going to be, then I don’t know what is. This trailer asks you to ‘come watch this absolutely mental flick about filicide—you’ll have fun!’ Now I pray to ye old ‘so bad it’s good’ gods: make this movie great. Oh ancient ones, grant us many more Nicolas Cage memes with this here movie.
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