Paul Schrader is a living Hollywood legend. Even if the man never wrote or directed another movie, his work as a screenwriter for Martin Scorsese  —  which includes Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Bringing Out the Dead  —  would ensure his legacy for generations to come. Thankfully, Schrader is still very much out there and looking to get his films made. Dog Eat Dog opened to mixed reviews at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, but even those who didn’t like it agreed that Schrader still has style to spare as a filmmaker. And now we’ve finally got a chance to check out the first trailer for his new film.

While this is all very familiar territory for everyone involved  —  break out your crime thriller bingo board and see how many boxes you hit!  —  there’s still a lot to like about Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe in a Paul Schrader film. Both actors are known not to shy away from darker and weirder material; if you’re looking to make a crime movie that focuses on the sleazy and the exploitative, you could do a lot worse than to ask Cage and Dafoe to go along for the ride with you. Dafoe in particular seems to be covering some familiar territory as the violent and child-like killer, but then again, who better than Dafoe to make it work?

Of course, the quality of the movie will most likely depend on which version of Nicolas Cage showed up to work. If we get the fully woke Cage from Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans or David Gordon Green’s Joe, odds are Dog Eat Dog will live up to at least part of its potential. If we get the sleepwalking Nicolas Cage from pretty much everything else? We’ll have to find another movie about baby kidnapping to give us our Raising Arizona bookend.

Here is the full plot synopsis for Dog Eat Dog, courtesy of ComingSoon.net:

Based on the award-winning book by author Eddie Bunker. Dog Eat Dog is a gritty contemporary crime thriller about a trio of ex-cons, deep in the underbelly of Los Angeles, who are hired for a kidnapping. When the botched abduction goes awry and gets completely out of control, the cons find themselves on the run, vowing to stay out of prison at all costs.

No official North American release date has been set for the film.

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