'Jiu Jitsu' Will See Nicolas Cage Fighting An Alien That Returns To Earth Every Six Years
Nicolas Cage refuses to make a boring movie. His eternal quest to have audiences say "What the hell is this?" continues with Jiu Jitsu, a sci-fi action film in which Cage will team-up with a martial artist to fight an alien – an alien that comes to earth every six years, looking for a fight.
Does this sound like the best movie ever made? Yes. Yes it does.
THR reports that the Jiu Jitsu movie will hail from writer-director Dimitri Logothetis, a filmmaker responsible for work on several Kickboxer sequels, which seems appropriate here. Alain Moussi, an actor and stuntman, will play "a Jiu Jitsu fighter who every six years must face off against an alien invader, Brax." Nicolas Cage will play a character who "teams up with him in a battle to defeat Brax." I'm a little disappointed Cage isn't playing the Jiu Jitsu fighter himself, but hey, beggars can't be choosers.
"After we successfully reintroduced the Kickboxer franchise to a new generation of martial arts fans with the sixth and seventh entries in the series, we set out to up the ante with a sci-fi martial arts franchise that could bring the same kind of intensity and longevity to a new arena," Logothetis said. Jiu Jitsu is based on a comic of the same name, written by Logothetis and Jim McGrath. Here's an excerpt from the comic's synopsis, which offers more insight into this story:
Jake McCall is a combat vet who now works as an assistant wrestling coach for a small college whose major claim is its wrestling team. He is married to a beautiful, caring wife and has a precocious five-year-old boy, and his life with them in a peaceful college town is idyllic (perfect outcome for a combat vet with PTSD). Or so he believes.
Long ago, floating particles from outer space took forms in human brains and have controlled human bodies by altering MEMORIES. A violent world-takeover now looms, an apocalyptic day that has been set for over a century. The players in this multi-generational plan are known only to each other, and only at certain times.
Jake McCall is at the center of the resistance to this plan, the lynchpin of the whole operation. And he has no idea.
The aliens have taken him, cloaked his brain with an array of false memories and perceptions, and robbed his life of the one thing he needs to save the world.
Jiu Jitsu.
Yes, this does sound amazing. Cage has been on a roll lately. His performance in Mandy is dynamite, and the film itself received a heap of praise – more so than any recent Cage film, in fact. He also appeared in the absolutely bonkers Between Worlds, in which he plays a truck driver who starts an affair with a teen girl who claims to be possessed by the ghost of his dead wife. Coming up, Cage has the Sion Sono film Prisoners of the Ghostland, which Cage himself describes as "the wildest movie I've ever made." In that movie, Cage plays a character who "is sent to rescue an abducted girl who has disappeared into a dark supernatural universe, they must break the evil curse that binds them and escape the mysterious revenants that rule the Ghostland."
And that's not all. The actor also has the H.P. Lovecraft adaptation The Colour Out of Space in the works, with director Richard Stanley at the helm. In short, it's a good time to be a Nic Cage fan.