The Surfer begins with a brief monologue, in which Nicolas Cage describes a wave as a force of pure energy. Anyone who tries to stop it or get in the way will be broken by it. All anyone can do is try to ride it. Throughout the rest of the film, it’s a mystery as to who’s the surfer and who’s the wave in this analogy.
Cage plays an unnamed Surfer (and also exec-produces through his Saturn Films label, as usual) who grew up in a beautiful home overlooking a magnificent beach in Australia. Long story short, Surfer relocated to the States after his father died under mysterious circumstances, and he’s spent his entire life trying to repurchase his old childhood home. In fact, he’s been so obsessed with his work that his wife is divorcing him, and his son (played by Finn Little) barely seems to know him.
Put simply, what we’ve got here is a mid-life crisis. Surfer claims that he’s doing all this for his son, to give his kid the life he had, but that’s a transparent self-serving lie. It’s clearly obvious at the outset that Surfer isn’t happy with what he has and he doesn’t see much of any future for himself, so he wants to keep on living in the past. Easier said than done.
Enter Scally (Julian McMahon), an old childhood friend of the Surfer. He’s since become an eccentric multimillionaire who brings his rich asshole friends and all their rich asshole kids to come enjoy the beach. This naturally means the rich assholes are drinking, doing drugs, throwing garbage everywhere, and outright assaulting anyone else who sets foot on this public beach.
Are they committing a crime? Several, in fact. But of course Scally is a wealthy upstanding citizen who owns a ton of local property and he’s putting money into the community. Moreover, these are rowdy young men who need to “blow off steam” and everyone would rather they destroy some out-of-the-way beach instead of destroying their homes and families. Most importantly, all of this hostility is apparently a good way of driving off vagrants and outsiders and other “undesirables”.
The upshot is that even though our Surfer was born and raised on this beach, he’s still considered an “outsider” by Scally and his cult. Thus literally everyone on the beach — up to and including local law enforcement, played by Justin Rosniak — sends the clear and consistent message that Surfer is not welcome here. They proceed to steal and/or destroy everything he has, leave him to bake in the Australia sun, gaslight him and everyone else into thinking he’s a vagrant bum, and generally do everything possible to dehumanize him. At one point, even the native wildlife literally shits on him.
Now, given that this is a Nicolas Cage movie, you’d expect there would be a point when Surfer finally snaps and decides to fight back. Here’s the problem: That point never comes. The best we get is a brief fight scene roughly 70 minutes in, but it’s over quickly and it’s totally ineffectual.
When a protagonist has zero agency in his own story, that’s a huge problem. When we’re watching a one-sided fight, that’s boringly predictable. When we’re watching 100 minutes of a character repeatedly getting his teeth kicked in long after it’s been definitively proven there’s nothing he can do to stop it, the resulting movie is a relentless slog. And it’s not like the Surfer is hateable enough to make his suffering any fun, it’s just depressing and monotonous.
Oh, and his board is the first thing that gets stolen. So this Surfer doesn’t even do any surfing in this movie. Did I forget to mention that part?
To be clear, I get what the filmmakers were going for. What we’ve got here is a film about the class divide between the wealthy and abusive few versus the poor and downtrodden multitude, and how we’re all much closer to becoming another homeless bum than joining the privileged elite. Because to the wealthy and entitled, everything and everyone else is only a plaything to be chewed up and shat out.
Even better, these themes all dovetail nicely with statements about toxic masculinity and the purported value of suffering. This is very much a story about how pain and sacrifice are supposedly beneficial, how “survival of the fittest” is the way of nature, and so on and so forth. The film shows with visceral clarity how this is the philosophy of a bully, and thus inevitably falls apart when met with someone tougher and crazier. It falls apart when met with someone who decides that no, the suffering isn’t worth the spoils and fuck you for suggesting that it does.
I’m perfectly fine with the messages here, and the themes are elegantly developed. Unfortunately, it’s harder to appreciate that when the film keeps on teasing the moment when Cage breaks out a can of bugfuck whoopass (i.e. the reason we came to see this movie) and it never comes. Even worse, anyone with an ounce of logic who’s paying the least bit of attention already knows exactly what the villains’ big plan is and how the Surfer’s real estate deal is going to play out. As such, we’re stuck waiting through this long and torturous runtime, waiting for Surfer to finally catch up with us. And it’s not great when a psychological drama like this is always two steps behind the audience.
While Cage delivers a performance of his typical quality, it’s the Surfer himself who keeps dragging this movie down. The protagonist’s motivation isn’t nearly strong enough to justify the unspeakable cruelty he gets put through and puts himself through in this picture. Seriously, if the Surfer is such a slave to nostalgia, so devoted to the way his hometown used to be that he keeps putting himself through the demon-infested hellscape that it presently and irrevocably is, there comes a point when he’s no longer a sympathetic or relateable character. You might want that house, my dude, but the house doesn’t want you back and it would only kill you if you got it. Take the fucking hint.
On a final note, I’d be remiss not to mention all the hallucinations and flashbacks. On the one hand, I get that this demonstrates how Surfer is succumbing to all the gaslighting, questioning his own history and mental health. On the other hand, it makes the Surfer crazier without ever pushing him to the point of effective retribution, and it makes him an unreliable narrator in the process. Neither of which makes this movie any easier to sit through.
While I totally and sincerely respect The Surfer, I also fucking hate it. I respect the intelligence and the craft that went into this. I can appreciate a solid modern parable about relevant and incisive themes. And at the same time, I can be completely and utterly revolted by this 100-minute movie that felt like three solid hours of continuous gut-punches.
This is exactly the kind of movie I’m glad I saw once, and only once. Only hardcore cinephiles need apply. If you’re looking for a head-spinning revenge thriller with Nicolas Cage that actually delivers on its promise of violent insanity, check out Mandy instead.