After legal issues scuppered their 2014 collaboration Dying of the Light, Paul Schrader lured Nicolas Cage back to work with a tempting offer: no budget, no interference and no rules. The result is Dog Eat Dog, an anarchic adaptation of the 1996 novel by career criminal Edward Bunker – Reservoir Dog’s Mr Blue and one of the most authentic voices in modern crime fiction. Bunker’s twilight underworld of faded felons is brought magnificently to life by Cage and his Wild at Heart co-star Willem Dafoe; as Troy and Mad Dog, they team up with fellow jailbird and gentle giant Diesel (Christopher Matthew Cook) to kidnap the baby of a rival mobster. That the plan doesn’t work out is a given, but what’s totally unexpected is the mayhem the team unleash. Visually far removed from Schrader’s early work, this is fun delivered with rude guerrilla gusto, featuring the most un-PC ad-lib you’ll ever hear from the mouth of a Hollywood star.