Drive Angry (Review)

Self-conscious junk is tough to pull off. It’s difficult to convince an audience that your movie is worth seeing when you’re intentionally trying to make it terrible. Attempts at so-bad-it’s-good grindhouse fare have become quite the trend of late, though they have yielded uneven financial success. Drive Angry, the latest shot at making the audience pay for an over-the-top guilty pleasure, is never quite able to become more than a mildly silly diversion. It’d be a lie to say there weren’t moments of genuine fun, but it’s hard to recommend something that barely even pretends to be worthwhile.

Nicolas “Sure I’ll Be in Your Movie” Cage plays Milton, a formerly-dead man who escapes from hell and comes back to Earth to avenge the murder of his daughter and retrieve his infant granddaughter from a Satanist cult. Meanwhile, Milton himself is being chased by The Accountant (William Fichtner), an employee of Satan who’s in charge of bringing escapees back to hell or something. Meanwhile, a lot of people drive. Angrily. With guns. Things go boom.

No one can accuse Drive Angry of false advertising. It delivers on just about every promise in the ads, but at the same time there’s nothing unexpected here. It goes about throwing slow-motion images of sex and ultraviolence on the screen so relentlessly that there’s barely any time for the audience to breathe. This film never sets up the action; it just gives it to you whether you want it or not. There’s a weapon introduced in Drive Angry that we know will be used at the climax, but by the time the film gets there we’ve already seen it used several times. This removes all surprise and excitement from what is supposed to be the most important scene in the movie. Drive Angry has this habit of taking a good idea, then showing you so much of it that it loses all effect.

If there’s one thing this movie wants you to take away, it’s that Nicolas Cage’s character is one cool dude. He never gets worked up about anything, but instead he goes about the acts of excessive violence with surgical precision. In one scene, he shoots a bunch of baddies while having sex and drinking from a bottle of Jack Daniels. All at once. It’s an admittedly clever enough (though vulgar) concept, but the film tries to give the audience a few too many of those moments. After a while, you can only sigh and say “we get it.”

The best character in Drive Angry is Fichtner’s Accountant, and he steals every scene the second he walks into frame. He carries out his job with a clever brand of pitch-black humor that keeps the movie from looking too in love with its too-cool-for-school attitude. Every other character plays one note straight through from beginning to end. Cage is the quiet drifter. Amber Heard plays a southern gal with attitude and surprising butt-kicking skill. Billy Burke leads his group of Satanists like the piece of white trash that he is. The Accountant is the only character that lends the film any unpredictability, not to mention Fichtner is genuinely funny.

It may sound ridiculous to chastise Drive Angry for being soulless, but it kept the experience from being too engaging. The strongest film in the recent grindhouse resurgence has been Robert Rodriguez’s Machete, and that was mostly because the film seemed to be having some fun with the whole experience. While that is sometimes the case with Drive Angry, it too often feels mean rather than diverting. Much like Cage’s protagonist, the film itself is far too cold and impersonal.

My reaction to Drive Angry is similar to how I felt about last year’s Piranha 3-D: it occasionally comes through on its promise of dumb fun, but too often it can stray into unpleasant waters. With ticket prices these days, it isn’t quite worth it to venture out to the multiplex and see crap like this. The budget for this film was allegedly in the area of $50 million, but I wouldn’t be surprised in the film didn’t make half of that back. Cultists are a lot less willing to embrace your movie if you’re shamelessly begging for their endorsement.

Rating:  (out of 4)

P.S.- It should be said that the 3-D isn’t too shabby. Do with that information what you will.