★★☆☆☆

There are good movies, bad movies and so-bad-they’re-good movies. Then there’s whatever “The Retirement Plan” has going on. An action comedy that can’t decide how seriously to take itself, the film snags an R-rating despite violence that’s a little more akin to “Home Alone” than “John Wick.”

When Ashley (Ashley Greene) and her husband Jimmy (Jordan Johnson-Hinds) run afoul of a powerful crime syndicate, she has to rely on her estranged father Matt (Nicolas Cage) to prevent her young daughter Sarah (Thalia Campbell) from getting caught in the crossfire. As she races around the Cayman Islands trying to get Sarah back from a henchman holding her hostage, Ashley soon learns that there’s a lot more to her father than his beach bum appearance suggests.

The immutable Nicolas Cage — an Academy Award winner, not that you’d know it from this particular performance —  is the main selling point of the film as a Rambo-style former government assassin who jumps back into action to protect his daughter and the family she’s formed in his absence. 

“The Retirement Plan” has earned the dubious distinction of being Cage’s lowest-grossing wide release of all time, taking in $745K from 1,175 theaters in its opening weekend. This is probably unsurprising to anyone else who was unaware the movie existed — I only had the honor of seeing it after stumbling into the wrong theater and being unable to look away. It’s got all the macabre allure of a car crash, with bonus points for sheer absurdity. 

Highlights include inspiring lines of dialogue like “Thank God my parents are dead,” “This is the part in the movie where I tell you not to be so hard on your dad” and “The old guy, he keeps killing everybody. Everybody.” A text message from a gangster to his boss reading “We’ve got a problem” with a glum emoji gets an honorable mention. 

The most compelling dynamic is actually between Sarah and Bobo (Ron Perlman), the lead henchman who somehow takes better care of her than any of her legal guardians. On account of being out of commission for most of the movie, Jimmy gets a pass. But Ashley sticks Sarah with a hard drive stolen from criminals who are more than willing to kill to retrieve it, and Matt nearly brains Sarah with an empty bottle when startled, then proceeds to offer her a beer. By contrast, Bobo buys Sarah pizza because it’s her favorite food, teaches her to play craps and thoughtfully discusses literature with her, making him a pretty decent role model if you ignore the death threats. It’s a shame this subplot goes nowhere, wasting what should be a slam dunk of a setup.

Save for Bobo, the crime boss’s underlings are a series of interchangeable baddies for Cage to shoot, knife, strangle, bean with a dumbbell or, memorably, flare gun to the face with aggressively mediocre special effects. The film has the general look and feel of an iMovie project, complete with a freeze-frame name card and whip-crack sound effect every time one of its dozen characters are introduced.

Visual gags, both intentional and unintentional, abound. Several action scenes involving Cage are as improbable as they are entertaining, and a body slowly sinking past a group of blissfully unaware scuba divers had all five people in the theater cackling. A character gets made fun of for referring to the hard drive as a “disc,” a joke either undercut or enhanced by the fact that it’s very blatantly a flash drive.

In any case, the drive is a textbook MacGuffin, an object relevant to the plot for no reason other than being something the characters want. Its exact contents are never specified, aside from being said to have “James Bond type shit,” and its ultimate purpose is to be used as political leverage by a fictional Floridian gubernatorial candidate. 

The movie ends on a strangely open note, with the status of two characters left unconfirmed, Matt seeming to reconsider his retirement and no official reconciliation between Ashley and anyone. It almost seems like “The Retirement Plan” is angling for a sequel. Against all my better judgment, I can’t help but hope it gets one.