Cast: Nicolas Cage, Josh Lucas, Malin Akerman, Danny Huston. Director: Simon West Runtime: 1 hour and 36 minutes Rating: 1.5 / 5 Movie Reviewed At: PVR, Udaipur.

Blimey! Cage’s back, the goons are back and guess what, the daughter of our fella is kidnapped by an age old comrade. Sounds familiar, right? If you have seen Taken, the recent Taken 2 or Ransom, there shouldn’t be any reason to squander your time in the theatre until and unless you are one of those guys who goes gaga over Nicolas Cage.

Will Montgomery (Nicolas Cage), an ex con and a distressed father finds out that he has to rescue his daughter from a buddy turned baddy by paying $10 million in 12 hours. Guess what? Our man is up to it. Rest what follows is the usual recipe swirled and whirled in ways you would definitely not like to watch again.

What’s wrong with Stolen? To start with, it has an extremely clumsy and derivative storyline. It stinks of other formula ridden movies which end up having the same fate as that of Stolen. The aerial shots, the bank robberies and the car chases leave as little as no effects as the movie clothed up by a sordid writing leaves the viewer disgruntled.

Stolen boasts of three different genres, that is; action, thriller and drama, but to the movie-goers horror, not one of them reaches to the height that would even make it a tolerable affair. The action is a drunken man’s job containing the most unoriginal sequences you would have seen in your recent times! Those car chases, seriously? Is this the best they can do? And well, one should not forget the FBI which was hovering over Cage as if they had no other work to do!

It is indeed true that director Simon West got all his ingredients wrong this time, but, there is some relief lurking in the shadows of those dull FBI cubicles. Guess who’s the caped crusader saving the horror for us? Bingo, Nicolas Cage! He might have lost that grip he earlier had, but still, he has one hell of a screen presence. Surprise also comes in the face of Danny Huston, the FBI agent, who cracks some chirpy one-liners to make an odd coupe laugh somewhere in the theatre. Although, Vincent (Josh Lucas), ‘the-old-friend-turned-villain’ looked like one complete lunatic on a run from asylum.

Positives: Nicolas Cage!

Negatives: Everything else.