Drive Angry Dir. Patrick Lussier

[Summit Entertainment; 2011]

Styles: action
Others: Shoot ‘Em Up

Drive Angry seems to have been misleadingly marketed as a modern entry into the exploitation film subgenre of “the muscle car movie,” recently rendered homage by Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse segment, Death Proof. But it bears a far fainter resemblance to the high-performance automobile-fetish porn of Vanishing Point and Eat My Dust! than, say, the Fast and the Furious movies, falling, as it does, in line with the more recent cutesy, “self-consciously stupid” action-porn movement best exemplified by 2007’s Shoot ‘Em Up. John Milton (Nicolas Cage) — who, in what I think is a confused attempt at a Joycean palimpsest, has been named after the author of Paradise Lost — has recently escaped from Hell (envisioned here as a prison whose interns are subjected to horrifying video feeds of the deaths of their loved ones) to hunt down the deranged, quasi-supernatural cult leader (Billy Burke) who killed Milton’s daughter and now intends to sacrifice his granddaughter in an effort to bring about the apocalypse. Helping Milton in his efforts is a foul-mouthed truck-stop waitress named Piper (Amber Heard), and seeking to recapture him is the grim reaper himself, here rebranded The Accountant (William Fichtner). You’re right; it is a mixed metaphor.

Cage, who ascended to the status of godlike genius with his performance in 2009’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and also won an Oscar about 20 years ago for his work in some other movie that nobody cares about, has settled comfortably into his newfound role as weirdo actor of his generation, offering here a dependable turn for which he has deigned to effuse the minimum amount of “cool” — or, as the kids are now calling it, “cage” — to sustain the viewer’s interest in his laughably ridiculous character’s mission. The same can be said of Heard, who, for the role, surely goes beyond what was required of her. It’s refreshing to see an action movie with a female heroine who does not have to sleep with her male counterpart, one who can punch and kick while being occasionally put at a realistic disadvantage by the biological constraints of weighing 120 pounds. This point should not be understated, as it would have been far too easy to condescend to the viewer by imbuing her with unreasonable strength and endurance. Fichtner is also delightfully creepy in his role, and it certainly helps that he’s beginning to resemble a slightly less intimidating Christopher Walken.

The main problem with ironic action films is that they labor under the misconception that there cannot be good action films. Scream worked as well as it did because it satirized things worth satirizing: slasher films, and not just any, but bad ones; while Airplane! parodied a genre that was so awful that it no longer exists. Last Action Hero, however, was a huge failure because it turned out a lot dumber than the seminal films it sought in vain to lampoon. And this is a problem frequently encountered by director/co-writer Patrick Lussier and co-writer Todd Farmer, as they tend to err on the side of trashiness: many of their attempts to jam-pack the film with as much smut as possible actually falter because they seemingly do not believe that trash can actually be made appealing. On paper, Piper’s fist fight with a sexy, naked bimbo is quite a lubricious prospect; but, to quote an episode of Seinfeld, a naked woman in a donnybrook is most certainly “bad naked.” The decision to include Peaches’ “Fuck the Pain Away” as horny, crazy Piper’s favorite song seems another wasted opportunity for trash-signification as, being an 11-year-old track, it’s possibly a standard by now. Added to which, the intendedly spooky and perverse cult sequences are laughably stupid, and at their best, the film’s many slow-motion, ultra-gory action sequences are simply bland and perfunctory.

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