Drive Angry (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Patrick Lussier. Starring Nicolas Cage, Amber Heard, William Fichtner
Awesomely terrible action gorefest.
Nicolas Cage plays a criminal who escapes from Hell to save his baby granddaughter from a Satanic cult. He is chased by a US Marshal-style character named The Accountant (William Fichtner) sent by Satan to retrieve him, and also for some reason by women who are into 47-year-old men with long bleached-blond hair.
Now, you're technically not supposed to learn most of these plot details until about three-quarters of the way into the film (despite them headlining every official trailer and synopsis), but it's better to know what you're getting into with Drive Angry. I suspect the reason the story takes so long to unfold isn't because the movie holds its cards close to its chest, but because the writers forgot what it was about until near the end. Exposition is not what Drive Angry does well.
What it does well is kill or maim people, although not necessarily in ways that make very much sense. At one point, Cage shoots the underside of a car flying over top of him, and it explodes.
When it lands, it explodes again. Another time, he shoots the knife a cultist is holding, causing its dull edge to lodge in the attacker's forehead. Fantastic.
These things might lead you to believe that Drive Angry is a whimsical take on a B-movie, but unlike, say, Machete, this is not a stupid movie made by smart people. It's the regular kind of stupid: horror director Patrick Lussier's very best effort at making an action film.
Nicolas Cage in an action role remains as ludicrous as ever, but his opponent The Accountant actually turns out to be a fairly entertaining character. Fichtner plays him with just enough of a deranged, nonhuman edge that we believe his wild personality shifts between scenes are because he's complex, not because he's terribly written.
I'm going to make the unthinkable claim that this film might actually be the worst thing Nicolas Cage has ever been involved in. But it's not the unwatchable kind of bad; rather, it's so joyously trashy that it brings out a horrible fascination about what will happen next. It's one of perhaps two or three movies I've reviewed that's bad enough to be kind of good.
Rated R for the old baseball-bat-through-the-eye.
2 out of 5
Passion Play (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Mitch Glazer. Starring Mickey Rourke, Megan Fox, Bill Murray.
A flaming nuclear wreck of a love film.
Passion Play is the story of a trumpet player (Mickey Rourke) who meets a woman with feathered angel wings (Megan Fox) in the sideshow tent of a desert circus. After some really awkward conversation and a murder attempt by a gang of angry carnies, the two of them escape the circus together.
The film's intent is a little hard to pin down at this point-the cartoony events so far suggest it could be some sort of surrealist drama, if a poorly plotted one. But we soon find that Passion Play is playing it straight. Every corny plot development is sincere, every nose-dripping drop of Hallmark sentiment delivered with unblinking conviction. The movie genuinely believes it's some kind of profound love story, not a creepy fantasy about Megan Fox running away with a weird-looking 60-year-old who paid a dollar to gawk at her in a freak show.
The remainder of the story is a mess of unexplained coincidences, clichés cobbled together from half a dozen different genres, and useless tangential characters.
The A-list cast is one of several bizarre contrasts to the dismal quality of the rest of the film, which is written and filmed like a student production.
Bill Murray looks sad and bored in his role as the gangster "Happy," and not just in the usual Bill Murray way-more like he's distracted by thoughts along the lines of, "You know, maybe Garfield wasn't so bad..."
And who can blame him when he's asked to deliver dialog like this? Here's an actual conversation from the film about the history of his nickname.
Happy: "I always hated it... until now." / Lily: "Why's that?" / Happy: "Because it fits finally. I am happy."
Writer/director Mitch Glazer apparently spent 20 years bringing his script into production. I wonder if he thought to read it over in that time.
Megan Fox pours herself into playing Birdwoman, and she's much better than I would like to admit.
It doesn't change the fact that her character is a pointless hollow shell, a textbook Mary Sue with all the requisite exotic powers.
Rourke's case is similar: he struggles valiantly to bring sympathy upon a character we have zero reason to like or care about.
One of the very worst dramas I've ever seen.
Rated R for toe-thumbs.
1.5 out of 5
