Like anybody else fascinated with mental illness, I’ve been following the career of Nicolas Cage very closely for the past few years. Movie choice after movie choice, line delivery after line delivery, and hairdo after hairdo, the man continues to keep me guessing at how self aware he is about what he is doing and how much of his late career can be completely chalked up to a mental breakdown of epic proportions. We’ve heard audiotapes of a lot of A-list Hollywood actors completely losing their grip and getting nutty over the past few years. It seems to be some kind of trend. Manic episodes are the new “it” thing, and I get that, but how does Nic Cage fit into the equation? I hear a lot of people explaining away his bad movies as a need to take any paycheck that comes his way due to impending bankruptcy, but I don’t buy it. Firstly, he’s been going after ridiculous roles for quite a while now. Remember that whole decade where he was doing all of the campaigning he could to get himself cast in every super hero movie that was in development? Remember the concept art for Tim Burton’s proposed Superman film with Cage as the most horrendously miscast Superman that I can imagine? And secondly, what’s the deal with his bankruptcy anyway? He has been a top-level actor in Hollywood for literally decades now. Brother was in The Rock. Did he really blow his whole life savings on mansions and jet skis and things? I would say that to do such a thing is in direct relation to the kind of mindset that leads someone to take any role where he gets to play a tough cop, a demon from Hell, an unstoppable hitman, a super hero, a cowboy zombie pirate, or whatever else thing that little children think is super wicked. It all adds up to mental discombobulation in my book. Something has happened to make Cage’s mind regress back to the summer of his twelfth year. His choices have been the cause of a lot of criticism and derision over the last decade, but I’ve been loving the journey every step of the way. Every bad movie, every ridiculous performance, and every stupid looking weave on his head grows the Nic Cage legend in my eyes. Drive Angry 3D is the next step in either the Nic Cage public breakdown or the Nic Cage life as performance art, and I really have no idea what to think about it.
There is a plot, but it doesn’t much matter. Nic Cage plays a character that breaks out of Hell to avenge his daughter’s death and get his baby granddaughter out of the clutches of an evil cult. The particulars of how any of this happens are never addressed. You’re just dropped into the middle of car chases and asked to beg for more. Along the way he meets a hot young waitress who joins him on his journey, he gets trailed by a mysterious and deadly character in a suit, and he kills a lot of people in elaborate and showy ways. To explain things further would be pointless. The real point of the film is allowing Cage to pose while wearing leather and sunglasses, look like a macho superman who can exert his dominance over anyone, and get hit on by every woman who he comes across. Most of this has to be written into his contract before he makes these movies.
Cage’s character is named John Milton, but for our purposes, and to ignore their insulting attempt at sticking a literary reference in the middle of all this nonsense, we will refer to him simply as Nic Cage for the rest of the review. You never really know what you’re going to get from Cage these days. In something like Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans you get him completely manic, gesturing wildly and playing everything with a crazy gleam in his eye that makes you uncomfortable sitting in your chair. And in something like Season of the Witch he delivers things so wooden and low key that you want to check him for a pulse. Here you get a little bit of both temperaments, and which you get seems to switch randomly scene from scene depending on what kind of a mood Cage was in on set that day. It’s a performance that seems to be the result of methamphetamines, bankruptcy, and onsetting Alzheimer’s. This time his hair is longish, but not shoulder length, it’s slicked back, and bleach blonde. He looks absolutely ridiculous. And wonderful.
Character actor William Fichtner shows up playing the mysterious figure trailing Cage. He describes himself only as “an accountant”, but it’s clear that he has mystical origins of some sort from the start. He is the best part of the movie, playing things so ridiculously cool and casual during the most catastrophic circumstances that you can’t help but squeal with joy every time he shows back up on the screen. Fichtner stands toe to toe with Cage here in a crazy acting choices throwdown, and the effort needs to be recognized and celebrated. Amber Heard plays the blonde girl, whose name is Piper. She’s not bad, but that’s by accident more than anything. While watching her performance you imagine that the casting process was getting a line of a couple hundred blondes in short shorts and running them through a tire obstacle to see who looked the best and didn’t get tired. Any acceptable acting that might show up is only incidental. Billy Burke plays Jonah King, the cult leader guy. He is ridiculously over the top, doing a crazy Creole accent, wearing multi-colored dress clothes, and carrying a cane made out of Cage’s daughter’s femur. He looks like he would be more at home as a cartoon villain than being anything existing in a live action film. In any other movie he would come off as completely ridiculous and awful, but here he just blends in seamlessly.
In the scene where Cage meets up with Piper he is getting some coffee at the diner she works at. She is having problems with her boss, who is the filthy, fat schlub working the grill that can’t seem to talk nice or keep his hands to himself. Only in movies is the gross sweaty guy working the grill the owner of the restaurant. Never in real life would you find a business owner unwilling to pay someone minimum wage to save himself from a life of sweating over a greasy mess. The point of this aside is that Drive Angry exists as a tapestry of movie cliché. It doesn’t even consider our world when creating it’s own, it just means to call back to memories of things you’ve seen while sitting in a cinema. These are the things that were going through my head as I sat in this film and tried to figure out what it was. I didn’t really have any other choice. You get well over an hour into this hour and forty-five minute movie before they explain any of what is happening. And once they do start explaining things the film grinds to a complete halt as you have to sit through boring dialogue scene after boring dialogue scene extrapolating things that you have long since stopped caring about. If this is just trying to be cheesy fun then what’s with all the boring parts?
Patrick Lussier is the director here and his attachment to the project doesn’t offer up any more clues as to what it’s trying to be. This isn’t like Grindhouse where a couple of successful directors purposefully dip themselves down into the mire of cheese. Lussier has made nothing but mediocre films, mostly forgotten sequels. So where does he get off directing something aimed towards being bad? How much of what is bad in this is on purpose and how much is just due to him being a bad director? And was signing him to direct just a part of the larger joke? He has a writing credit, is that from a last minute rewrite or did he help conceptualize this project? How far down does the rabbit hole go?
Much of Drive Angry is supposed to be parody. There is a scene where Nic Cage has sex fully clothed, with a cigar in his mouth, a gun in one hand, and a bottle of Jack Daniels in the other. He kills about ten people busting in his hotel room without ever taking his penis out of the cocktail waitress. Clearly the scene is supposed to come off as a skewering of over the top action movie nonsense. But there’s another layer to it as well. A couple years ago Cage was completely ripped due to some combination of HGH, whippets, and pumping iron. He found an excuse to take his shirt off in every movie that he appeared in. These days he’s not looking so good. As a matter of fact, he’s looking pretty pale and gangly. In Season of the Witch he was covered in heavy cloak and armor the entire film. Here the clothed sex scene is obviously an excuse to keep his gaunt frame covered up. You can’t help but wonder how much control Cage has over the content of his films and how much of their direction stems from his fragile ego making lengthy lists of demands. Is this supposed to be an irreverent send up of bad action movies, or is it Cage’s latest legitimate attempt at making himself into some sort of icon of manliness? My opinion on his intentions changes from film to film, and that’s why I find him so fascinating.
