Sometimes I think about how there are people out there who will watch this movie, and consider the scene where Nic Cage and Willem Dafoe are in their underwear squirting each other with ketchup and mustard in slow motion, to be "stupid" or "terrible", and it makes me depressed. The cure to that depression, though, is being able to watch a scene where Nic Cage and Willem Dafoe are in their underwear squirting each other with ketchup and mustard in slow motion, so I guess it all evens out.

verbiage indeed... an anti-wit, anti-fun postmodern crime caper. might be genius.

I had this dilemma on Dog Eat Dog. Three white ex-cons form a crime group. The PC side of me felt one of them should be black but if blacks and whites don't hang out in prison why should they after? So I made them white and even let Willem use the N word. On First Reformed and Card Counter there were important roles for blacks who could have been white so I seized the opportunity.

I believe there is an obligation. If you are making a contemporary story set in a diverse culture, there no excuse not to make an important character a person of color. It's the way we open the talent pool. That's no longer the issue that it was thirty years ago but the principle still is valid.

Paul Schrader has made no secret of his frustrations about interference from the studios or moneymen that fund his films, going so far as to openly protest the release of 2014’s “The Dying of the Light” with a Facebook post in which he declared that the project “Was taken away from me, reedited, scored, and mixed without my input.” Of course, that was hardly Schrader’s first rodeo. A pugnacious poet-warrior whose screenwriting credits includes the likes of “Taxi Driver” and “The Last Temptation of Christ” (and whose occasionally transcendent directorial efforts make those movies look commercial by comparison), he’s never been a big fan of playing things safe. With the bawdy and intoxicatingly batshit “Dog Eat Dog,” Schrader is off the leash once and for all.

READ THE FULL REVIEW ON INDIEWIRE

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A coked-out, slimy submergence of grime, guts, drugs, and crime. Too bad Schrader has totally lost his marbles. Willem Dafoe is the MVP in a film also starring Nicolas Cage, and that's probably the most confusing thing about this cheapo Dadaist gag.

drugged out, washed up, surreal noirification of a pathetic, repugnant version of three criminals' real lives who match each of the above adjectives. Cage channeling Bogart is the key here, and its genius hit me in the final scene: an exhausted, out of touch criminal yearns for the days of clean, glorified crime and miserably miscalculates each and every encounter. so much fun, so completely wacked out; Cage and Dafoe own this.

Lmao this was ridiculous and I kinda loved it.

The opening scene is a crazy setpiece of absurd lunacy and I was all in on wherever this movie would go. Not gonna lie, I was pleasantly surprised by this Paul Schrader madness.

I had a little fun here. For me, Porter Wagoner's "Satan's Got a river" encapsulated the characters in Dog Eat Dog, swimming in Satan's River never to get across. After about 30 seconds Deantonni and Nicci of We Are Dark Angels transform Porter's cool song into a dub step beat. All with the blessing of Porter's daughters. God bless them ! Enjoy!

If Schrader's trying to say something about his time possibly being up...maybe he's right?

Schrader embracing cartoonish disrepute. Cage doing Bogart. Dafoe doing...something. This is a glorious nothing of a movie.

from the opening scene, i knew this was special.
from the moment willem dafoe drunk ranted on taylor swift in the strip club i knew this was brilliant.
from the moment nicolas cage said "traphouse" i knew this was the dopest film ever put to celluloid and is likely the best movie of the century.

(fr guys, this isnt just a grade for enjoyment, its extremely well made, crazy, unpredictable, super well acted, excellent writing, dope color grading, production design, editing etc, the final scene is surprisingly heavy symbolic/relevant, schrader is a god and i cant wait to visit the rest of his filmography)
(one of cage's best performances 😍)