Review: DRIVE ANGRY 3D - Strangely Mild On The Schlock-O-Meter

rating: 2.5

With his recent glut of increasingly low-rent cinematic forays - culminating in the almost unbearably dull Season of the Witch - combined with the blatantly obvious fact that he's only making them to stave off bankruptcy, Nicolas Cage may well have subjected himself to a whole new subgenre of filmmaking - Cagesploitation. Drive Angry 3D pits Cage as the ridiculously-monikered Milton, a man who has broken out of Hell in order to save his baby granddaughter from being sacrificed to a Satanic cult, led by the man who murdered his daughter, Jonah King (Billy Burke). Teaming up with tasty waitress Piper (Amber Heard), Milton must put the cult to an end while outrunning the advances of The Accountant (William Fichtner), an envoy of Satan sent to Earth in order to return Milton to Hell. Patrick Lussier, the director of Drive Angry 3D and one of the few to use 3D technology properly - his first film was the inventive if uneven schlock-fest My Bloody Valentine 3D - has refined his craft to an even sleazier degree here, with the emphasis on washed-out colours, sexy babes and fast cars evoking that 70s exploitation feel. While an absolute mess, the problem with Drive Angry isn't its sparse plotting - because, let's face it, the real Grindhouse films never had much of a focus beyond boobs and blood anyway - but that it's just never as outrageous as you think it's going to be. For a film titled Drive Angry, it's a surprisingly languid outing, and while there are plenty of charmingly off-kilter idiosyncrasies - Cage randomly giving a waitress a full-on smooch for one - it feels quite lifeless and padded at times, especially around the middle. Nicolas Cage also looks tired and strangely doesn't seem to be having much fun; where is the part of him that made Caster Troy and Lieutenant McDonagh so uproariously entertaining to watch? Where is the Cage who apparently knew that he was making something awful in The Wicker Man, and hammed it up "intentionally"? Here he is positively tranquilised; the sunglasses that he wears only compounds this effect - while not even rendering him that badass - and the leg work is left to fall on Cage's altogether more consistent co-star... William Fichtner dusts the cobwebs away, thankfully, delivering one of his best performances as The Accountant, a dryly sarcastic minion of the Devil who seeks out Cage with an efficiency that's more than reminiscent of Terminator 2's T-1000, even extending the homage to having Fichtner hijack a hydrogen tanker in the climax (featuring what I hope is intentionally the worst CGI I've seen in a theatrical release in about a decade). Absolutely the film's ace in the hole, he gets the best lines, has the most convincing physical presence (well, perhaps Amber Heard trumps him there...), and he seems to be having the most fun. Heard, meanwhile, is the spunky, chirpy, no-nonsense waitress with a cute southern drawl and cuter hot pants, filling them out as ably as the role requires. Still, she's nothing but window-dressing, while David Morse, playing Milton's moustached buddy Webster, is easily forgotten once you leave the cinema. More memorable is the well-cast Billy Burke as the leader of the Satanic cult, but every second the film's without Fichtner is pretty much a mistaken one, and in the second-half, he's just not in it enough. There's just too much downtime between shoot-outs and car chases, and a lot of the zanier moments have been shamelessly pilfered from better films - a mid-coital shootout between Cage and a fleet of baddies, while The Cage is still hanging out of a sprawled bimbo, is blatantly ripped off of Shoot Em' Up, and some gratuitous 3D nudity is replicated from Lussier's previous My Bloody Valentine. These pieces aside, the scant morsels of action just lack the frenetic energy they should have; the car chases feel slowed-down, sluggish, and the surrounding plot isn't interesting enough to compensate. The Dogma-esque religious revisionism is fun, but it's just not developed or laced with enough irony to be truly satisfying. It's an easy viewing, and you'll be kept watching in the hope that it gets crazier, but really, it doesn't. What could have potentially been Cage's own Crank franchise is curiously bland - a few nutty moments aside - and Fichtner's turn, hilarious though it is, just isn't really enough to justify the 3D-inflated asking price. Drive Angry 3D is released in the U.K. this Friday.