The Retirement Plan is about a young couple on the run from a crime boss and his goons. Their daughter winds up in the Cayman Islands where she meets her estranged grandpa as played by Nicolas Cage. The goons follow and Cage has to step up and save his family.

There’s a solid thirty minutes of funny/quirky action/comedy buried in this schizophrenic flick. It wasn’t the opening thirty or the closing, but some random stretch right in the middle. It wasn’t as quirky or arch as they seemed to think… but I laughed or smirked enough.

Unfortunately the rest of the movie is a generic crime thriller mixed with a tough guy/cute kid movie mixed with a dragged-out spy movie mixed with an afterthought of a gray-hair action hero flick. Everything is a generic version of whatever the movie is doing at any given moment.

Everyone in the surprisingly eclectic cast is in a different movie… and often slide in and out of genre as needed. Nicolas Cage is at about a 5 or 6 on his wacky meter until they need him to be a stoic Liam Neeson aging badass. Ron Pearlman plays a self-aware goon who recites Shakespeare… he’s having fun. Ernie Hudson spouts emotional truths in a scene where he acknowledges he’s here to spout emotional truths. Jackie Earl Haley is largely just a stock mob boss… as if he didn’t get a memo. Then there’s a random pair of boring CIA agents who are in a more convoluted spy thriller who take over the movie in the final act.

This is a tedious movie with sparks of potential if they could only have settled on a theme, style, or genre. Any consistency would have helped since the flick isn’t spry enough to handle its narrative shifts. We get what I can only assume was a rejected mid 90s Tarantino knock-off someone found in a drawer after all these years.

Score: 68