When it comes to missing out on movies during their theatrical run, I’m not often given to regrets; that’s what home video is for.
I regret not seeing Drive Angry on the biggest possible movie screen.
Drive Angry is 104 minutes of lurid, trashy fun. It’s an honest-to-God Grindhouse entry (sorry, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez), except all the boring parts are chopped out and the good stuff is held together by gallons of CGI blood and an “anything goes†mentality.
I mean, how many action movies can you name where the hero (named “John Milton†and played by Nicolas Cage, which should tell you everything you need to know about whether or not you’ll enjoy Drive Angry) is a undead demon of vengeance who literally busts through the gates of Hell in a Dodge Charger in order to save his baby granddaughter from the clutches of a castrated, Jim Jones-esque devil worshipper?
Realistically, Drive Angry isn’t for everyone; potential fans, you know who you are. That’s part of what I love about it—the film is just so unapologetically out there. Director Patrick Lussier has finally redeemed himself for the cinematic abortion that was his last film, the horror remake My Bloody Valentine. For all its much-vaunted gore, My Bloody Valentine was a sloppy concoction of uninspired slasher hijinks and soporific character work (it drained “Supernatural’s†wonderful Jensen Ackles of his charm and good humor).
The transition from horror to more action-related thrills does wonders for Lussier. End of the day, Drive Angry is a race-against-time piece at 70 MPH, and Lussier maintains a nice, propulsive energy, alternating between bloody shootouts (standout: Milton simultaneously having sex and shooting up a horde of bad guys) and high-octane car chases (the one involving two cars and a trailer home is particularly good).
Most surprisingly, Lussier manages to keep the tone goofy enough (no small feat considering the depths of depravity present) that his reliance on CGI in the action scenes doesn’t matter as much as it might otherwise—if the whole film’s a live-action cartoon in spirit, who cares if it looks like one as well?
A movie like this requires its actors to do just two things: kill people and/or die themselves. Happily, the cast of rive Angry expends more effort than that; it’s a mishmash of acting styles, with Billy Burke’s sneeringly flamboyant villain butting up against Nicolas Cage’s hilariously taciturn hero (think Jeff Bridges in Starman if Bridges wanted to destroy Earth rather than study it) butting up against Amber Heard and David Morse’s surprisingly committed and unironic performances butting up against William Fichtner’s dead-on Christopher Walken impersonation, but everyone commits so fully to their particular tone that you end up with five or six completely different one-man shows existing in the same frame.
Drive Angry works a special kind of magic; every element is so relentlessly preposterous and contrived that, working together, they become demented positives. In the Nicolas Cage Canon of Crap, it hews closer to Con Air than to Ghost Rider, and for that, I owe. This is a minor classic of trash cinema.
Interested parties: Â Drive Angry is available for your rental and owning pleasures. Â Make use of those Amazon and Netflix accounts…
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