“The Trust” starts as a wry comedy about two bored bad ass cops working in the evidence room of the Las Vegas Police Dept. These quirky characters are Stone (Cage) and Waters (Elijah Wood, showing he can play non-Hobbit roles.) When Cage finds out that a heroin dealer quickly got $200,000 cash to pay for his bail, he asks Wood to help him discover how such a huge amount of cash can be moved so easily.
After some illicit investigation, they learn that there’s a big loot waiting for them in a cavernous underground safe buried deep beneath an apartment building. So they start planning on how to penetrate the vault. From being a satirical comedy, the movie then becomes a very dark heist film where the best laid plans of the lead characters go haywire. This starts with that scene where Cage suddenly shoots a gun dealer upfront for no apparent reason. From here, the movie goes downhill with very slow moving storytelling that culminates in a very twisted ending that will leave viewers very frustrated.The movie features 50’s comedian Jerry Lewis as Cage’s father but he appears only in a couple of scenes and quickly vanishes. In fairness to Cage, you can always rely on him to give a convincing performance and he manages to deliver quite a riveting portrayal as a loopy, trigger happy dirty cop who delivers his deadpan lines with wit. Wood has a more thankless part as the slacker cop who just looks so bored even when he’s having sex with a prostitute. But the truth is we never really care for the characters they play and when they meet a sad fate towards the ending, we viewers couldn’t really care less whatever happens to them.
