The trouble isn’t just that “Sympathy’s” script seems to frequently nod towards other films without ever feeling like its own organic construct. He’s gone through similar bags of tricks before, to greater effect - most recently just a couple of months ago, in “Renfield.”

But this getup turns out to be no more than another vaudevillian distancing device for the actor, one that doesn’t particularly pay off this time. And given the jokey way he treats the character for a long time, we do wonder if he’s meant to be a literal Beelzebub come to claim a sinner (whose identity he might be mistaken about) for eternal damnation. With spiky dyed flame-red hair, goatee and lounge-lizard smoking jacket, Cage only needs a pair of plastic horns to look the complete costume-party Satan. Stopping at a roadside diner, their already unpleasant dynamic gets a lot worse, with the stranger making it clear he’s perfectly willing to kill innocent bystanders if David doesn’t admit to some guilt he still has no apparent clue about. David tries various means of escape, to no avail. X is just playing some perverse game that will lead to no serious harm is extinguished when they’re stopped for speeding, an encounter with law enforcement that quickly turns violent.

Yet it seems he’s really acting out some personal vendetta, though David appears baffled as to what that might be, or how they could have any prior connection. At one point the abductor claims he just wants to be driven to visit his dying mother at a hospital in another city. When not threatening harm, swilling from a flask, or riffing on whatever random subject comes to min, the nameless aggressor hints he knows things about David - that the latter once had a drinking problem himself, that they may have met previously in Boston, and so on. Pleas about his spouse’s status get our hero nowhere: “ I’m your family emergency now,” crows this snarky, volatile intruder. But as he’s parking in the facility’s garage, a flamboyantly turned-out stranger (Cage) simply climbs into the backseat, ordering him at gunpoint to drive away. David Chamberlain (Kinnaman) is harried from the start, dropping a young son at grandma’s en route to the Las Vegas hospital where his pregnant wife is about to deliver - a source of more than usual concern, with the couple having lost another child in birth complications.

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