So this flick as well too ordinary and stupid, though watchable because of the Cage. It's attempts at scare are little more than jump scares punctuated by loud, painful screeches. So the Nicolas Cage into this after the legal struggle in You know the story, but with the different actors and settings! I doubt even hardcore Nicolas Cage fans can get much out of this. It won't really entertain or scare you, but at least it won't completely bore you and isn't as mind-numbingly awful as some of the options out there. There is a new movie with him coming out constantly, and for people like me who don't like him it seems that it happens more than it should.
It's not like anything scary happens in the first place, but it's just so odd how the sound is handled. In some ways, I've seen the movie one hundred times before. One year after Mike Lawford's young son disappeared during a Halloween carnival, he is haunted by ghostly images and terrifying messages he can't explain. He delivers a solid, believable performance, perhaps the only one of the movie. These things are only compounded with the woodenly doe eyed performance of Callies as Cage's estranged wife and the token bad child actor performance of Jack Fulton as their son. For example the middle portion of the movie suffers from some sort of identity crisis.
Weirdly enough these moments occur when nothing scary is happening onscreen. This film is not worth unless you're a Cage's fan who backs him every time or love to take chances on the B films. His performance here really shows off how basic his acting skills are. I get that he's seeing a vision of his missing son, but there's actually scary or even remotely creepy about it. However, as with the plot, I just never was able to suspend disbelief.
It is the apex of lazy screenwriting. At which point it starts to rip-off Insidious. Sarah Wayne Callies on the other hand is quite good. Cage just doesn't look the part anymore, and it shows as he runs just a bit slower and with a longer gait that his days in The Rock. What must he or she be paid with? Now Mike Cage will stop at nothing to find him. Recommendation engine sorted out suspenseful, scary, atmospheric and suspense films with plots about storytelling, supernatural, mentor, dialogue, ghost, catastrophe and ghosts mostly in Horror, Thriller and Mystery genres. What if there's something behind it? The matching attributes are highlighted in bold.
The script does its job, mostly. Together with his estranged wife, he will stop at nothing to unravel the mystery and find their son—and, in doing so, he unearths a legend that refuses to remain buried in the past. It's attempts at scare are little more than jump scares punctuated by loud, painful screeches. That's not where the weirdness of the movie ends. This is the most anyone is ever going to really say about it. Cage, at this point in his career, is a little too paunchy, and his face a little too droopy to pull off the father of a young child. Definitely not scary or the suspenseful, yet everybody tried their best to make the product better.
Edel having been so deadset on casting Cage, should have reworked the script to where the child was the son of Cage's much younger sister, or, god forbid, Cage finally steps in and accepts that he is old enough to play a grandfather. It just sits there, being what it is. Someone, or something, is abducting kids on October 31 st, and many of the guardians of the abductees tell the same story of the titular phrase being said just before they disappeared. Together with his estranged wife, he will stop at nothing to unravel the mystery and find their son-and, in doing so, he unearths the legend of the crying woman who refuses to remain buried in the past. It's not his fault, but Edel's, and Cage does his best to carry the film. There's a lot of weirdness to the movie.
Nicolas Cage is one of those actors. Much like that movie this is actually a pretty interesting movie that was fun to watch and did have a little Poltergeist feel to it. Cage and his ex search for their lost child, and become involved with a Celtic cult that specializes in burnings. Plot: halloween, ghost, police, missing child, nightmare, rescue, professor, supernatural, kidnapping, revenge, burned alive, car accident, children, money, morgue, united states of america, bus, death of child, teddy bear, husband wife relationship, father son relationship, falling to death, taxi, child murder, police officer. But the different cast, setting, et cetera makes it worth a watch.
There are no glaringly bad lines, but the pacing is ineffective and wildly uneven, and events unfold less from the hard work of the parents trying to find their child than from the parents haphazardly stumbling into people and places that get them closer to their son. If you really need to watch a horror film and have somehow exhausted the plethora of better options out there, then by all means give Pay the Ghost a watch. All these his recent B films just somewhat shines because of having him onboard. Cliché, unoriginal, boring and bad acted are probably the best adjectives to describe this movie. It goes for the haunted house angle, moves onto some paranormal investigation, and even has a brief stint with possession all before settling on one of those ghost revenge stories where the angry specter punishes people who actually had nothing to do with what made them mad in the first place. Still though, you might just be better off popping in a comedy or something.
Overall film was okay, but I think the end should have been better. He definitely would come back to his old form, but it's not known when. Unfortunately not even that can elevate Pay the Ghost to anything more than mediocre. Of course, Mike is a distant dad, not around enough as he tries to earn tenure at the university where he teaches. When the one year anniversary comes and still no sign of his son he starts to experience strange things. It literally has two characters at the 70-minute mark explain the entire narrative—where Charlie is, how to save him, why he was taken, etc.