THE COLLECTION / 2006

For the curious · proposed 102 min · US PG-13

The Wicker Man (2006)

The island keeps its secrets. Cage keeps raising his voice.

Written and directed by Neil LaBute · US theatrical baseline: 102 minutes · US: PG-13
Starring: Nicolas Cage · Ellen Burstyn · Kate Beahan · Frances Conroy · Molly Parker · Leelee Sobieski · Diane Delano
Cinematography: Paul Sarossy · Editing: Joel Plotch · Music: Angelo Badalamenti

Nicolas Cage points a gun at a woman because he needs her bicycle. An urgent search for a missing child has somehow become an extremely hostile transaction over transport. The Wicker Man keeps finding this register: something that ought to be frightening or desperate arrives with the indignation of a man disputing a parking ticket.

Neil LaBute's remake has an understandable idea. Take a policeman into a closed community, give everybody reasons to withhold information, and let his certainty about his own authority make each encounter worse. Cage can make that certainty enormous. The trouble is that the movie keeps inflating his frustration without developing an equally persuasive atmosphere around it.

The result has memorable comic eruptions and long stretches of less memorable investigation. Those eruptions are the reason to be curious. They are also the reason a short compilation can make this seem like a much more consistently entertaining film than the one you actually have to sit through.

Before you watch

Fatal road accident and child death: the opening depicts a woman and child trapped in a car struck by a truck and engulfed in fire. The failed rescue returns in disturbing memories and nightmares; this is not a sustained depiction of burned bodies.
Violence and intimidation: Edward threatens a woman with a firearm and physically attacks women during the investigation. There are beatings, distress and a disturbing corpse image.
Bees and allergic vulnerability: bee imagery and a serious allergy matter to the threat. A more explicit, revealing sequence is specific to the unrated version and is described only in the protected details below.
Version-dependent brutality: the unrated ending adds stronger violence. General sex-and-nudity content is limited, with clothed kissing and sexual/fertility references; there is also strong language.

Cynthia Fuchs's detailed content guide supports the accident, bodily threat and violence. The BBFC distinguishes the cinema presentation, described as containing moderate horror and violence, from the director's cut, which adds a strong-violence warning. The film's comic reputation is a poor substitute for those distinctions.

Specific content details (contains spoilers)

Edward is confined in the wicker structure and burned to death; the structure and his screams convey the killing without detailed burned-body imagery.
The unrated ending depicts Edward’s legs being broken and bees poured into a mesh helmet over his head. The US theatrical cut omits the helmet sequence and keeps the leg-breaking outside the image.
Animal sacrifice forms part of the rite, as corroborated by the content guide; the article does not claim detailed individual animal injuries.

Know which version you are getting

The US theatrical release opened on 1 September 2006, distributed by Warner Bros. Its rating is PG-13, and this article uses an approximately 102-minute theatrical baseline. Box Office Mojo lists 1h42m; the BBFC cinema record runs 101m47s. The Numbers lists 103 minutes, a catalog discrepancy rather than proof of another cut.

The home-video unrated version changes the ending. Its best-known addition is discussed below the spoiler boundary. The detailed edition comparison also establishes that it removes a closing scene present in the theatrical release. These are content differences, even though both versions run roughly the same length at comparable playback speeds.

The BBFC's 97-minute home timings should not be compared directly with cinema or NTSC timings to calculate missing footage. The edition comparison identifies its theatrical sample as PAL and its unrated sample as NTSC. Check the actual edition, rather than assuming a shorter number means a shorter story or a streaming listing contains the famous clip.

A second chance to do something useful

Edward Malus is a California police officer whose attempt to save a woman and child ends in disaster. When his former fiancée Willow asks for help finding her daughter Rowan, he travels to Summersisle, an isolated Pacific Northwest community. Sister Summersisle presides over an island whose women have authority and whose answers do not become clearer when Edward repeats the question more forcefully.

The contemporary Warner Bros. promotional material reproduced by Blackfilm makes the intended emotional connection explicit: the search offers him a chance to act after a failed rescue. That is a workable reason to send this particular man into this particular situation.

The difficulty is sustaining it. The film's opening gives Edward an injury, but much of the investigation expresses that injury as generalized agitation. His desire to help is clear. His inner life becomes less specific as his volume increases.

The islanders' evasions create another problem. Withholding information can make a community seem quietly coordinated. Repeatedly presenting an obvious obstacle can also make the next scene feel like the previous scene with a different woman answering the door. The mystery spends too much time displaying its own refusal to move.

Cage gives the frustration a body

Cage is the most distinctive thing in the picture. A question becomes an accusation; irritation arrives as if it has been waiting just out of shot for its cue. The physical certainty makes Edward more conspicuous precisely when he needs to observe.

That is a real comic possibility. A man can possess institutional authority and still have very little control over a room. The stolen bicycle is a particularly useful image because his show of power ends with him pedaling away. The disproportion is already there before anybody puts the moment online.

The burned-doll interrogation has a different pleasure: a simple demand acquires an unreasonable amount of vocal pressure. The energy makes an otherwise routine clue difficult to forget. It does not make the investigation surrounding it less repetitive.

Calling Cage an actor who simply failed to notice the absurdity would be inaccurate. In Quint's 2010 interview, Cage discusses recognizing the comedy of the physical violence and his surprise at the scale of the online response. His phrase “not know how absurd that is” leaves little room for the claim that every comic effect escaped him.

That settles part of the intention question, not the quality question. Knowing a gesture is absurd does not make every scene around it successfully comic. The performance can be deliberately excessive while the movie remains uncertain about what to do with the excess.

The women have power. The screenplay needs more than that.

The gender reversal is the remake's major organizing choice. Authority on Summersisle belongs to women; Edward's position as a policeman and outsider brings him little automatic deference. Ellen Burstyn's calm gives that arrangement its strongest counterweight to his agitation.

At its best, the setup makes his assumption of control look foolish. But the women are too often presented as a succession of hostile functions: obstruct the question, withhold the clue, become the next physical obstacle. There is less sense of a lived social arrangement than of an argument being staged for Edward to stumble through.

His violence against women exposes the instability. The action can make him look grotesquely overconfident and invite laughter at the disproportion. It can also turn female resistance into an excuse for a comic blow. The film does not consistently control the difference.

That uncertainty is more useful to discuss than announcing that the film has one perfectly settled message about men or women. Vern's 2007 review also identifies the tension between a hostile gender fantasy and a possible joke about the protagonist's belligerence. The problem is the dramatic arrangement: whose behavior gets a reason, whose gets a punch, and what the film expects the audience to enjoy.

The invented community is also a fictional construction. It does not establish anything about actual pagan practice or women exercising authority. Its bee-and-honey symbolism supplies a conspicuous scheme; a scheme is not yet a convincing society.

An island that needs a life beyond its clues

Paul Sarossy's photography gives the woods and isolated settlement a useful physical presence. There are places for a person to become disoriented and disappear from easy assistance. The landscape is not the basic problem.

The film gets less from the inhabitants' ordinary life. A community becomes frightening when its routines remain coherent to its members and inaccessible to a visitor. Here too many encounters seem to exist primarily to produce Edward's next outburst. The setting starts looking like a collection of stations in an exercise designed to frustrate him.

Angelo Badalamenti's score contributes a separate layer of unease, but music cannot supply the communal texture the investigation keeps neglecting. Burstyn's composure suggests a more sustained register of menace. The movie repeatedly leaves that register for another emphatic confrontation.

This is where comparison with Robin Hardy's 1973 film becomes illuminating. The original gives its visitor a sharply defined religious worldview and surrounds him with public activity, music and competing convictions. Edward's traumatic history serves a different function. Changing that foundation is a legitimate adaptation choice; the new version still needs a comparably persuasive relationship between character and community.

A memorable failure is still a full-length film

The commercial figures support the account of a disappointing theatrical run without requiring a made-up production story. Box Office Mojo reports a $40 million budget and about $38.8 million worldwide. The Numbers reports a different worldwide total, about $37.7 million, while corroborating the US opening date. Ticket sales alone do not produce an exact profit-and-loss account.

The subsequent attention is a different story. Cage was already discussing the film's online afterlife in 2010. The gap between narrative purpose and memorable gesture makes it particularly available for excerpts: remove the waiting and connect the eruptions, and Edward becomes the star of a much more concentrated farce.

That is a legitimate way to enjoy parts of a movie, but it does not answer whether the complete film works. Someone who loves the clips may enjoy their context. They may also discover that the context is the thing the clips improved by removing.

The unrated version makes some individual moments more explicit. It does not rebuild the investigation or give the supporting characters substantially richer lives. Simon Crust's contemporary DVD review confirms the theatrical/unrated package and their ending distinction. Choosing the edition matters; treating it as a comprehensive artistic repair would overstate the change.

Corny DNA

Heightened performance, heavy symbolism and bizarre physical encounters give this a substantial camp case. Some comic intent is documented. Some of the pleasure also comes from the mismatch between a scene's intended urgency and how awkwardly it lands.

That makes the distinction between deliberate excess and enjoyment of failure especially useful here. One cannot be used to explain every moment of the other. The picture's memorable extremes also do not establish that its running time will be pleasurable to revisit.

Its circulation as clips and a cult curiosity is relevant to the argument. It does not supply six numerical ratings or an owner endorsement. The Corny DNA profile remains unscored.

Verdict

For the curious — proposed. Cage's physical and vocal choices make this worth examining as an unstable mixture of mystery, gender conflict and farce. The repeated investigative beats, thin community and uncertain treatment of violence prevent that curiosity from becoming a general recommendation.

Most useful if you want to see the complete film behind the clips, or compare how a remake changes a strong dramatic foundation. The isolated comic moments are real attractions. Expect to spend a considerable amount of time getting from one to another.

Spoilers from here

Reveal Rowan's parentage, the trap and the theatrical/unrated endings

The rescue has been arranged around the rescuer

Rowan is Edward and Willow's daughter. Her supposed disappearance has been used to bring him to the island, and she leads him back to the community after he believes he has rescued her. He is the intended sacrificial victim. The film account corroborates those relationships and the deception.

The revelation gives Edward's failed rescue at the beginning a cruel structural role. He wants the later rescue to correct it. The islanders have made that desire useful to them. His increasingly forceful conduct does not give him the understanding he thinks it demonstrates.

The family connection adds personal betrayal. It also makes the film's gender conflict more literal and less interestingly open: the women have not merely failed to respect his authority; they have organized an elaborate use of his intimate attachments.

The bear costume is a separate action beat

Edward obtains the bear costume through violence and uses the disguise to enter the procession. This is separate from the earlier bicycle theft. The comic disproportion of the costume has become part of the film's reputation, but its story function is an attempted route into the ceremony.

That distinction matters to the criticism. A strange costume can be intentionally funny while serving a practical role. Its presence alone does not prove that the entire story was conceived as a parody.

Both versions kill Edward

He is confined inside the wicker structure, and Rowan starts the fire. His death is conveyed through the burning structure and his screams, without a detailed close-up of a charred body. The rite also involves animal sacrifice, as documented in the content guide. The spectacle of communal belief has acquired a direct physical cost for its victims.

The fact of the killing is shared by the principal versions. The alternative ending does not let him escape. Its major changes concern how much preceding torture is shown and what follows the burning.

The unrated version shows the bees

The unrated ending depicts Edward's legs being broken, then a mesh apparatus over his head being filled with bees. His allergy makes the assault a deliberately tailored form of torture. The theatrical cut keeps the leg-breaking outside the image and omits the famous bee-helmet sequence. These differences are documented by the linked edition comparison.

The added suffering can be more explicit and still have acquired a comic afterlife. Its meme status does not change what the scene depicts. As an ending, it extends the victim's physical helplessness; it does little to make the society carrying out the killing more dramatically convincing.

The theatrical version adds the bar

After the sacrifice, the theatrical version jumps ahead six months to Willow and Honey meeting men in a bar, suggesting that the community's recruitment can continue. The unrated version ends after the burning instead of retaining that coda.

The coda changes the final emphasis from this victim's destruction to a repeatable operation. It also spends time explaining a continuation the ending hardly needs. The darker stopping point is cleaner, but neither version resolves the weaknesses in the journey to it.

Sources

This is a source-based editorial draft. No fresh viewing or settled owner opinion is claimed.