In casting “Dog Eat Dog,” Director Paul Schrader got two game actors in Willem Dafoe and Nicolas Cage, who gleefully feed off of each other. It’s as if they’ve been working together for years. Their chemistry is what drives this fiercfully funny movie.
The opening scene to the film, a little backstory about Dafoe’s Mad Dog, is an open invitation for the audience to get on board with the movie or not, filled with nasty gravitas, wholly terrifying violence and non-PC humor. There isn’t an ounce of fat in Screenwriter Matthew Wilder’s wildly inventive screenplay. The film is an amalgam of everything that’s come before it in the gangster genre and yet it feels fresh. Schrader’s direction is possessed, and he hasn’t seemed this energized by a film since 2002’s great “Auto Focus.”
This is only Wilder’s second screenplay, and yet the freedom he was given to write “Dog Eat Dog” is, quite frankly, refreshing.