Review of Drive Angry (2011) by Thegodfatherson — 15 Jun 2013

For reasons best known to him and his accountant, Nic Cage has come to specialize in a strange brand of self conscious trash cinema that's somewhere between gutter exploitation and camp glory. If David Lynch is directing him (in Wild at Heart) or Werner Herzog (in Bad Lieutenant) then the results can be extraordinary. But most of his flicks fall well short of the mark. For twenty or thirty minutes it looks like Drive Angry might be genuine pulp glory, a riotously entertaining redneck rumpus. But it falls apart. If you’ll pardon my French, (and if you won’t, then you better avoid this flick) cowriter-director Patrick Lussier (My Bloody Valentine) has got the balls, but that’s about all he has. Now, balls will get you through the door, and Drive Angry announces itself with some considerable verve: a foul-mouthed monologue by one of Satan’s minions a character called “The Accountant”, played with consummate panache by William Fichtner; a high speed car-chase through some burg identified as “Laughter, Colorado”; and a spectacularly gory, Mad Max style set-to, in which Cage’s blonde-haired “John Milton” blows away four or five bad-asses, but only after establishing the whereabouts of his baby granddaughter, who we soon learn is to be a human sacrifice performed by a satanic cult leader played by Billy Burke (Kristen’s dad in Twilight). By now more or less the time Cage shoots off someone’s hand and sends it careening into the 3D bespectacled audience’s collective lap we have a strong suspicion that this is going to be the most unapologetic 18-rated movie a major movie star has given us in some time. That suspicion grows stronger as we’re introduced to Amber Heard’s salty-tongued waitress, Piper, and then her cheating fiancé (played by the movie’s cowriter, Todd Farmer), who she catches in flagrante, as it were. There are limits of course, this being a studio movie from the US of A. Yes, we can see heads skewered with wooden sticks. Yes we can see eyeballs gouged. Yes we can see Milton shoot half a dozen satanic goons at the same time as he’s playing hide the Chihuahua with some freaked out floozy (but not before one of them sticks his backside with a cattle prod). But the filmmakers tastefully draw the line at full frontal nudity below the waste because that would be obscene, I guess, and generate the dreaded NC-17 rating in the US. And that would never do, not even for a loud, proud redneckerama drama like this one. What else can I tell you? If you saw Shoot Em Up, you probably felt a shudder of recognition at the description of that violent sex scene. And that’s a bit of a downer, because hard as it tries to shock, Drive Angry keeps coming off as a rehash of a bunch of other movies: Ghost Rider definitely comes to mind, and Jonah Hex, The Prophecy and Mad Max, a bit of Tarantino and a lot of Robert Rodriguez (but it’s not anywhere near as good as those guys). The thing is, Lussier and Farmer have ripped off some good stuff, but they don’t have much of a clue how to fit it all together. So the movie just judders to a halt between the set pieces, and frankly, most of the set pieces aren’t all that either. The 3D disguises his ineptitude a little, but Lussier is out of his depth when it comes to putting a complicated action sequence together. Like too many of today’s Bay-acolytes, he cuts fast but he cuts sloppy. What works: Fichtner is excellent, a suave emissary providing the larger than life performance the movie badly needs and (surprisingly) doesn’t get from Cage, who seems to be going through the motions this time. Also surprisingly good: Amber Heard, who comes out swinging and keeps on slugging. And I guess the 3D, which seems of a piece with the tackiness of the enterprise, even though it comes with the heavy price of butt-ugly cinematography.

What doesn’t: a story that feels stretched the way those cliffhanger serials used to back in the olden days. And pretty much everything else, though they might say that’s intentional.

Ideally see it at a drive-in after half a dozen cold ones. I know, I know: that’s both impossible and socially irresponsible. But there you have it.