A pretty surreal photo of Nicolas Cage surfaced on the internets a couple week ago, where he's hanging out with Andrew Dice Clay at a Guns N' Roses concert, sipping wine and wearing a t-shirt of his own face like it was just another day at the office. That photo embodies the cultural phenomenon Nicolas Cage has become: a medicore talent belonging to another era of filmmaking, turned into a cult artist through a series horrendous career decision and facial limitations that may or may not have something to do with plastic surgery. The irony was so universally embraced that it made its way to Cage himself and landed on his t-shirt. I usually have a fondness for Nicolas Cage movies. I love to see him not even pretend to care about a dumb, cliché storyline. I don't have any fondness for DRIVE ANGRY, though. It's the absolute worst movie I had the displeasure to see since THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE. It's an unforgivable piece of shit.
The movie opens with Milton (Nicolas Cage) driving a muscle car and shooting at hoodlums. It's not too clear why at first, but he seems like a man on a mission. Milton unexplainably hitches a ride with token love interest Piper (Amber Heard) after meeting her at a restaurant and creeping up on her. There is another dude named The Accountant (William Fitchner), trying to catch up to Milton, and that guy doesn't even try to cover his steps. He's some kind of creature from another world that carves his way up to Milton using his super powers. Turns out that Milton is a dead man who escaped the depths of hell to avenge his daughter, who was killed by the leader of a Satanic cult and to save his granddaughter, his only link to the world of the living. There's no real background information whatsoever on that fact, you'll have to take Milton's word for it. That and the supernatural chicanery occurring in DRIVE ANGRY.
Where do I start?
Let's talk about the screenplay? Usually, screenplays in bad movies try too hard. They are fishing for great lines or trying to set up ridiculously epic scenes. In DRIVE ANGRY, it's the opposite and that's the main reason behind its mind numbing lack of depth. Screenwriter Todd Farmer (who stars in the movie as the abusive boyfriend of token love interest Piper) also wrote the reputably bad screenplay of Jason X (also known as Jason in Space), so he's not stranger to terrible writing. But he really outdid himself with DRIVE ANGRY. It's like to point at laughably bad lines but there aren't. This movie just wallows in clichés and easy decisions. I mean, Milton has a daughter in hell that is supposed to justify his killing spree despite that you never actually meet the character and empathize with her, the Satanic cult is actually a Satanic cult because they're the guys supposed to do the bad things. They could've been a plumbers union or Jehovah's Witnesses, it wouldn't have made any difference on the storyline.
DRIVE ANGRY embraces cheap decisions and avoids original thoughts like the plague, which is like inventing a new way of being boring. Man, I would love to tell you that this movie is offensively stupid or trying to implant corrosive ideas in your head, but it's just not. It's a rushed, uninspired and lazy piece of shit with no visual identity whatsoever that's trying to cash-in on popular gimmicks: a laconic, muscle-car driving badass, gun fights, car pursuits, an unlikely hero's journey, some of the most witless humour you'll have the misfortune to witness, it's like Todd Farmer and director Patrick Lussier created a collage of cinematographic tricks, yet didn't give it a proper identity. It doesn't have an ounce of creative light within. DRIVE ANGRY is a movie that believes it can sell you what you've already seen a thousand times if it's repackaged differently. This witless zombie is, fortunately, not fooling anybody.
You can't create a cult movie by thinking you're going to create a cult movie. I'm pretty sure Patrick Lussier and Todd Farmer had noble ideas when they started planning out DRIVE ANGRY. I'm sure they wanted to create the next darling of midnight screening. But when you're blinded by the ambition of what you want you're movie to be, you end up not paying enough attention to what you're exactly seeing and the end product suffers from the Robb Flynn Syndrome. DRIVE ANGRY has a wicked, violent case of the RFS, it's a hollow movie that tries to seduce its audience by copying the easiest, most tired stereotype in the action movie business. I would've loved to tell you that this is simply a stupid movie, but it's not even the case. DRIVE ANGRY is to generic and lifeless to be stupid. When a movie is too lazy to even try and insult your intelligence, you know you've scraped the bottom of the barrel.
You can't create a cult movie by thinking you're going to create a cult movie. I'm pretty sure Patrick Lussier and Todd Farmer had noble ideas when they started planning out DRIVE ANGRY. I'm sure they wanted to create the next darling of midnight screening. But when you're blinded by the ambition of what you want you're movie to be, you end up not paying enough attention to what you're exactly seeing and the end product suffers from the Robb Flynn Syndrome. DRIVE ANGRY has a wicked, violent case of the RFS, it's a hollow movie that tries to seduce its audience by copying the easiest, most tired stereotype in the action movie business. I would've loved to tell you that this is simply a stupid movie, but it's not even the case. DRIVE ANGRY is to generic and lifeless to be stupid. When a movie is too lazy to even try and insult your intelligence, you know you've scraped the bottom of the barrel.
