Drive Angry (2011)

Written by Todd Farmer and Patrick Lussier
Directed by Patrick Lussier

Right from the opening, Drive Angry sets the bar high. Joining a car chase midway through, it all comes to a quick end as Milton (Nic Cage) questions the men he just chased down before blowing them away. It feels like it will be a fun ride, unfortunately, the rest of the film never lives up to its opening.

The film has all the right elements to be a bloody romp through the American southwest, instead it becomes a fantasy horror film in plot and tone, but in the end the whole thing feels like you've watched 5 different movies. And that's the problem, you only watched one.

The Accountant (William Fichtner) is hunting Milton, for reasons that are explained in the end of the film (which, really, if you couldn't figure out from the beginning who he is and what he's doing, you're watching the wrong movie) when there was no explanation required. Instead, they wasted about 4 scenes going over this.

Who cares exactly who he is? The coy reveal at the end is like taking a shit on a Jack in the Box restaurant table. People might be stupid, but they're surely notice the even worse stupidity going on around it. Far too often, I'm sure that's exactly how it felt.

The only really effective characters are Jonah King (Billy Burke) and The Accountant, and hey, surprise, both of them are the best actors in the film. Nic Cage is stuck in his usual rut, playing a shitty-haired, tough guy with no respect for the rules, blah blah blah. Cage has played this same character over and over now, but at least with stuff like Bad Lieutenant he was going batshit insane going for it all (hence the multiple failures) but here he doesn't even try. He just looks tough and shoots stuff.

I've seen it all before, and what's troubling is I've seen all of Drive Angry in about 40 different films. The chases are the same, the f/x are arguably worse, the shootouts are mindless (and ultimately pointless), and Amber Heard is given literally nothing to do. "Look pretty and make faces during the chase scenes" is probably about the extent of the direction she received.

This is one of those "money" films, where everyone knows it's not great, but they do it for the money. Sadly, in this case, this movie petered out horribly, arguably the worst money loser of 2011 so far. This was a movie that just couldn't win from the script. I suppose when you make a few hundred million for a studio though, they don't mind if your little $25 million indulgence doesn't work out.

Because you'll be back to make Halloween 3-D, and that will make $25 million opening weekend, guaranteed. Done and done. I've seen many of Lussier's movies, and sadly this is still one of the best.

With all that said, despite the silliness, the bad acting, the shitty script, the boring direction, it's still somehow a decent action film. Nothing more, nothing less. This is one of the many scripts that was made specifically because it was written in such a way that 3D could easily be applied (or was the goal from the outset), and these days, that alone is often a greenlight.

I recommend this to fans of 80's action films, Nicholas Cage, and occult horror (even though the scenes depicting occultism are so laughably stereotypical and bad), because there's some scenes to be enjoyed here. Tom Atkins arrives for 5 minutes to steal the show from everyone except Bill Fichtner. If you like violence, action, and John Carpenter's Vampires, you might like this. I don't know why, but Vampires seems like a good comparison, although it's overall a better film (for those that have seen it....exactly) they both feel like it's stuff we've all seen before, because we have.

I realize my overall review seems negative, but ultimately, I'll watch this again. It's just not one of those films that blew me away, or even utilized its genre status to go as far as it could. The whole thing just feels half-assed from everyone involved, it seemed like they did it against their will. Who knows, maybe they did.

8.2/10 (B-)