If you haven’t seen “Drive Angry,” allow me to congratulate you. You’ve made a wise decision. Or you’re fortunate to not have been in a position to see it. I chose to review it instead of “Unknown” because it was the newest of the two films and it stars Nicolas Cage. There was a time when money spent on a Cage picture was money well spent, but these days, it would be more entertaining to sit in a theater lobby and watch people.
As the realization that I’d chosen poorly hit me like a hammer, I thought about the guy who’d said to the ticket agent, “One for Unknown,” and I envied him. At that moment, he was in another theater, watching Liam Neeson try to figure out why another man would steal his identity. I thought about how my option to leave and see that movie instead had evaporated at about the 20-minute mark, and cursed my choice like a soul that awakens to find itself in Hell.
I should have known I was in the wrong theater right off the bat. My first clue should have been the barrage of four letter words, creative variations of the same, and livid prayers to God and Jesus that passes for dialogue during the first few minutes of the movie. That doesn’t bother some people, nor does the quality of a movie rise or fall based on its number of obscenities, but it struck me as excessive.
Excess is what “Drive Angry” is all about. Which brings me to what should’ve been my second clue that I would’ve been better off at home watching the “Empty Nest” marathon on Hallmark: the gratuitous nudity and raunchy sex. “Gratuitous” means different things to different people. To me, it means “Drive Angry” would make the creators of “Girls Gone Wild” jealous.
You might be saying, “This sounds like my kind of movie!” And I’m not here to tell you it’s not. But you might want to consider my third and final reason for loathing “Drive Angry”: the ludicrous storyline.
“Drive Angry” stars Cage as John Milton, a vengeful dad who breaks out of Hell in a classic muscle car to stop a Satanic cult from murdering his granddaughter. The leader of the cult, Jonah King, hopes to unleash untold demonic forces on the Earth, and figures the best way to do it is get a gang of rednecks drunk, have them dance naked under a full moon and sacrifice a baby to Lucifer. To get things rolling, he kills Milton’s daughter and kidnaps the granddaughter.
Milton sees all of this through a “live video feed” in the Lake of Fire. Determined to stop King and his band of crazies, he crawls out of the hole in which the devil had placed him, borrows Old Scratch’s car keys and burns rubber all the way to the surface. Close behind is The Accountant, whose job is to make sure all of Hell’s residents are present and accounted for.
Tagging along with Milton is Piper, a waitress who lends Cage’s character her 1969 Dodge Charger, and then asks a lot of questions about who he is and what he’s done, but doesn’t seem too concerned about the lack of answers, even once the bodies start to pile up.
To keep the movie’s more astute viewers from pondering the John Milton reference, writer and director Patrick Lussier uses this scenario as the foundation for an extended chase sequence. The Accountant chases Milton, Milton chases King, King’s cronies chase Milton, and the law chases Milton and Piper. Lussier slows things down from time to time to allow the story to unfold, but not so long that audience members have enough time to start asking questions like, “Why doesn’t Piper take the next bus back to Texas?”
It should be clear by now that I’m taking “Drive Angry” more seriously than it takes itself. Lussier set out to make a B-grade exploitation picture, and nothing more.
On that level, he succeeded. The fist fights, gun battles and car chases are all well photographed and edited, if lacking in style, and Lussier does a good job of foreshadowing bits and pieces of the story to build suspense.
William Fichtner also delivers the goods as The Accountant. He plays the character straight, but in doing so, earns a lot of laughs. I admit to chuckling when he told one teenage pothead, “I won’t see you again until you’re 73,” and then said to his friend,
“You, I’ll see in a few months.”
Roger Ebert, in his review of “Drive Angry,” wrote that a movie review should determine what a film hoped to achieve, and whether it succeeded. With his wise words in mind, I concede that “Drive Angry” is everything Lussier wanted it to be. But I don’t have to like it.
Rated R for brutal violence, grisly images, graphic sexual content, nudity and pervasive language. Two stars out of four. Next week: “Rango.” Email David Laprad at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald.com.