The Humanity Bureau is a 2018 dystopian thriller set that sees the world in a permanent state of economic recession and facing serious environmental problems as a result of global warming.
While there was a time when looking forward to a Nicolas Cage movie was an actual thing, the rate he churns them out these days and the quality of such have left most of his recent work one to miss. More so, he’s been relegated to smaller parts and often stripped of the very bravado that makes watching him act the ‘Cage Experience.’ With Rob W. King‘s latest The Humanity Bureau, at least the actor gets a more substantial bit in a film with an engaging if now familiar agenda. It’s a heavily-stylized, very low budget effort that suffers for it, the filmmakers ambitions stretched well beyond their capacity, leaving it lacking crucial momentum to make this something of any significance.
It’s 2030 and the world has, as expected, sunk into chaos. Global warming, economic upheaval and a savage civil war has left the United States in ruins, forcing the government to implement a powerful police state. A new agency called The Humanity Bureau has separated the citizenry, herding those deemed valueless to the wastelands while those assessed otherwise live in New Eden where people strive to better humanity in a uptonian existence. Noah Kross (Cage) is somewhat of a radical, working for the bureau, combing the outskirts for people whom he thinks might deserve a chance to join the other side. He soon comes upon Rachel (Sarah Lind) and young Lucas (Jakob Davies), believing they are worthy, however they all become targets of relentless hunter Adam Westinghouse (Hugh Dillon), another bureau officer who disagrees with Kross’s motivations.
One of the most basic calling cards of the post-apocalyptic landscape is the visual cues that such a thing occurred at all, helping to invest the audience into the setting, or at least creating some atmosphere. However, The Humanity Bureau is left to do so only with dialogue and an opening crawl of text that suggests so. To help convince us, we spend much of the film in small towns on open roads, but there is nothing remotely visual to give us any sense of the state of decay the country is supposedly suffering from. That leaves it to the characters, with Kross taking to the sideroads to interview potential candidates for transfer to New Eden, some who are proud of the old ways and violently uninterested in leaving their meager existence. There’s even an unsurprising connection to the current administration as integral to what’s happened.
Ostensibly, this is meant to be a kind of on-the-run movie with a big baddie on their heels, giving the film some opportunities for action, with gun battles and car chases, but these are not all that energetic and far and few between the less than meaty dialogue. In some ways, this feels rather like a throwback, but neither the aesthetic nor the action live up to it, mostly because some very obvious green-screening spoil any hope of authenticity, though this might have been an intentional stylistic approach. Either way, it fails, leaving the film mostly joyless, a rote experience with little to make it worth the effort.
Cage, as mentioned, has a big role, but he lacks any of the terrific presence of so many of his early films and while that might be expected, it’s sort of necessary here. Refusing to embrace the B-movie mentality of it all, the movie is too serious to enjoy, and while there are some good moments, especially with Lind, this just limps along to an ambiguous ending that I suppose could lead to a part two, though that’s looking highly unlikely. There’s much better bad Cage movies to watch.