45 years since making his acting debut in the ill-fated pilot The Best of Times, Oscar winner Nicolas Cage hasn’t slowed down. After a 2024 filled with the psychological thriller Longlegs, the underrated indie horror Arcadian, and his surreal thriller The Surfer, he added two more films to his lengthy resume in 2025. Among them was The Carpenter‘s Son, a horror film steeped in controversy for how it portrays the younger years of Jesus Christ and the forces of evil that influence him. Neither critics nor audiences fell in love with the feature, but despite everything working against it, Lotfy Nathan‘s biblical terror wasn’t the worst-reviewed of the two titles.
Gunslingers marked Cage’s third Western since 2022, following his starring turns in Butcher’s Crossing that year and The Old Way in 2023. Compared to those grittier affairs, it was a decidedly more over-the-top film, unfolding in a small Kentucky town where everyone’s a criminal and the most wanted man in America has just resurfaced. Immediately, his violent past catches up with him as a vicious mob arms up, eager to collect on the eye-popping bounty on his head. Bullets fly, and brothers clash with brothers as the town gets torn apart in the fight to ring up the notorious gunslinger, but he and the rest of the denizens quickly make his enemies pay for their greed. For as gonzo and entertaining a premise as it offers, it earned a ghastly 5% score from critics and 18% score from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, along with a 5/10 from Collider’s Robert Brian Taylor.
Yet, icy reviews haven’t kept this fast-shooting feature down. On the HBO Max global charts, Gunslingers reached #2 this week, behind only the Gerard Butler-led Den of Thieves 2: Pantera. Cage is always a draw, and the film showcases him at his goofiest, playing a hammed-up, hoarse-voiced reformed outlaw who acts as the town photographer and always carries a bible. Joining him are Blade star Stephen Dorff and Boogie Nights alum Heather Graham, alongside Mohamed Karim, Scarlet Rose Stallone, Tzi Ma, and more. Behind the camera is Brian Skiba, who also previously worked with Dorff on the thriller Clear Cut.
Collider Exclusive · Action Hero Quiz Which Action Hero Would Be Your Perfect Partner? Rambo · James Bond · Indiana Jones · John McClane · Ethan Hunt
Five legends. Five completely different ways of getting out alive — with style, with muscle, with charm, with luck, or with a plan so intricate it probably shouldn’t work. Ten questions will reveal which action hero was built to have your back.
🎖️Rambo
🍸James Bond
🏺Indiana Jones
🔧John McClane
🎭Ethan Hunt
01
You’re dropped into a dangerous situation with no warning. What do you need most from a partner? The first few seconds tell you everything about who belongs beside you.
02
You have to get somewhere dangerous, fast. How do you travel? How you get there is half the mission.
03
You’re pinned down and outnumbered. What does your ideal partner do? This is when you find out what someone is really made of.
04
The mission is paused. You have one evening to decompress. What does your partner suggest? Who someone is when the pressure drops is who they actually are.
05
How do you prefer your partner to communicate mid-mission? Good communication is the difference between partners and a liability.
06
Your enemy is powerful, well-resourced, and has the upper hand. How should your partner approach them? The approach to the enemy defines the partnership.
07
Things go badly wrong and you’re captured. What do you trust your partner to do? Who someone is when you need them most is the only thing that matters.
08
What does your ideal partner bring to the table that you couldn’t replace? A great partner fills the gap you didn’t know you had.
09
Every partnership has a cost. Which of these can you live with? No one comes without baggage. The question is whether you can carry it together.
10
It’s the final moment. Everything is on the line. What do you need from your partner right now? The last question is the most honest one.
Your Partner Has Been Assigned Your Perfect Partner Is…
Your answers have pointed to one action hero above all others. This is the person built to have your back — for better or considerably, spectacularly worse.
Rambo
Your partner doesn’t talk much, doesn’t need to, and will have assessed every threat in your immediate environment before you’ve finished your first sentence. John Rambo is not a man of plans or politics — he is a force of nature shaped by survival, loyalty, and a capacity for endurance that goes beyond anything training can produce. He will not leave you behind. He has never left anyone behind who deserved to come home. What you get with Rambo is the most capable, most quietly ferocious partner imaginable — one who has been through things that would have broken anyone else, and who chose to keep going anyway. You’ll never need to ask if he has your back. You’ll just know.
James Bond
Your partner will arrive perfectly dressed, perfectly briefed, and with a cover story so convincing it’ll take you a moment to remember what’s actually true. James Bond is the most professionally dangerous person in any room he enters — and the most disarmingly charming, which is the point. He operates in a world of layers, where nothing is what it appears and every advantage is used without apology. You’ll never be bored. You’ll occasionally be furious. But when it matters — when the mission is genuinely on the line and the margin for error has collapsed to nothing — Bond is exactly the partner you want. He has survived things that have no business being survivable. He does it with style. That is not nothing.
Indiana Jones
Your partner will know the history, the language, the cultural context, and exactly why the thing everyone else is ignoring is actually the most important thing in the room. Indiana Jones is brilliant, reckless, and occasionally impossible — but he is also one of the most resourceful, most genuinely knowledgeable partners you could find yourself beside. He approaches every situation with a scholar’s eye and a brawler’s instinct, which is an unusual combination and a remarkably effective one. He hates snakes and gets personally attached to objects of historical significance, both of which will slow you down at least once. It doesn’t matter. What Indy brings is irreplaceable — and the adventures you’ll have together will be the kind people write books about. Assuming you survive them.
John McClane
Your partner was not supposed to be here. He does not have the right equipment, the right information, or anything approaching the right odds. He has a sarcastic remark and an absolute refusal to accept that the situation is as bad as it looks. John McClane is the greatest accidental hero in the history of action cinema — a man whose superpower is stubbornness, whose contingency plan is improvisation, and whose capacity to absorb punishment and keep moving would be alarming if it weren’t so useful. He will complain the entire time. He will make it significantly more chaotic than it needed to be. And he will absolutely, unconditionally, without question come through when it counts. Yippee-ki-yay.
Ethan Hunt
Your partner has already run seventeen scenarios by the time you’ve finished reading the briefing, and the plan he’s settled on involves at least two things that should be physically impossible. Ethan Hunt operates at the absolute edge of human capability — technically, physically, and intellectually — and he brings the same relentless precision to protecting his partners that he brings to dismantling organisations that shouldn’t exist. He is not easy to know and he will never fully tell you everything. But he will carry the weight of the mission so completely, so absolutely, that your job is simply to trust him — and the remarkable thing is that trusting him always turns out to be the right call. The mission will be impossible. He will complete it anyway.
Nicolas Cage Is About to Swing Onto Television for the First Time This Month
As always, Cage is keeping his schedule packed with projects throughout the rest of the year. Chief among his new films is the David O. Russell-directed Madden, starring Cage as the legendary NFL coach and commentatorand Christian Bale as former Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis. However, this month will see the star lead his first-ever television series with Spider-Noir, casting him in a role familiar to his Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse part, but set in an altogether different world. He’s playing Ben Reilly, a down-on-his-luck private investigator, haunted by profound tragedy, who has to balance his identity as New York’s only superhero in the 1930s. Soaked in noir tropes and packed with classic Spider-Man villains, it hails from Oren Uziel and premieres first on MGM+’s linear network in the U.S. on May 25 before all episodes arrive on Prime Video on May 27.
Gunslingers is now streaming on HBO Max internationally, but U.S. viewers can currently catch it on Prime Video. Stay tuned here at Collider for more on all the hottest streaming titles throughout the year.
