Nicolas Cage's Bonkers 2011 Action Comedy Drive Angry is Ridiculous, Fun
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Nicolas Cage is a famously intense, Academy Award-winning thespian and a scion of one of our most legendary show-business families. Yet he was not hired to act in the gloriously trashy 2011 action-horror-comedy Drive Angry so much as he was hired to do his crazy Nicolas Cage shtick.
They did not hire Cage the actor for Drive Angry, or Drive Angry 3-D as it was known in theaters, on account of it being not just a movie in which badass crazy motherfucker Nicolas Cage drives angry; it’s a movie where he drove angry IN ALL THREE DIMENSIONS!
Instead they hired Nicolas Cage the meme, Nicolas Cage the trash icon and Nicolas Cage the madman. That’s just what they got and the film is better for it.
Drive Angry doesn’t call for an acclaimed actor in the lead role. It calls for a movie star with a good sense of humor about himself and the world and a keen understanding of its innate ridiculousness.
In a non-Academy Award-winning performance, Cage plays John Milton, a hell-bound hell raiser who escapes hell like some kind of Ghost Rider powered by a spirit of vengeance.
Milton is a man on a mission. He wants to redeem a wasted life by saving his granddaughter from a Satanic cult intent on unleashing hell on earth so he steals Satan’s gun, The Godlkiller, with an eye towards sending cult leader Jonah King (Billie Burke) to hell where he belongs.
At a diner the scruffy stranger with the disconcerting resemblance to Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger meets hard-luck waitress played by Amber Heard, an actress best known for role in the Depp-Heard trial and for sullying the good name of the saintly Johnny Depp.
Heard is typecast to perfection as a charismatic bad girl for whom Peaches’ “Fuck the Pain Away” isn’t just a jam; it’s her anthem and personal philosophy.
Women are inexplicably drawn to our anti-hero despite his resemblance to the guy from Nickelback and home address in the bowels of hell. He’s game but not to the point where he takes off ANY of his clothes before making the beast with two backs.
In perhaps the film’s signature scene, John multi-tasks like a champ by drinking directly from a bottle of whiskey, smoking a fat cigar (an illegal one, from Cuba, no doubt), killing bad guys with a gun and having sex with a busty, traumatized waitress ALL AT THE SAME TIME.
Why doesn’t he at least take off his shirt? As he brusquely explains, “I don’t disrobe before a gunfight” and he sensed that something was about to go down.
All the while John is being pursued by The Accountant (William Fichtner), a top associate of the Devil that the scene-stealing character actor plays as a dry-witted, perpetually annoyed bureaucrat who just happens to work for the personification of evil.
Drive Angry was designed to showcase its badass star at his most badass and extreme yet the most badass and unforgettable performance in the film belongs to Fichtner, who fucking destroys without doing much of anything at all.
In a movie that otherwise has no use whatsoever for restraint or understatement, Fichtner is bone-dry as a higher-up in the demonic hierarchy who has more respect for Cage’s anti-hero than he does for Satanists, who he views as silly and unworthy.
I am inherently skeptical of movies that broadcast their awesomeness. We should be wary of movies that anoint themselves cult classics without waiting for the world to render its own judgment.
That’s Drive Angry. It’s even more true of Drive Angry 3-D. I had the honor and the pleasure of watching Drive Angry in 3-D during its theatrical release and it used the technology as it is supposed to be used: as a dumb, silly gimmick to sell tickets and make an already ridiculous redneck spectacle even sillier.
Oh, and also to have things fly at the screen—IN 3-D! Drive Angry is every bit as dumb, silly, vulgar and self-indulgent as you would not only expect but angrily demand from a movie called Drive Angry. And that is VERY dumb, VERY silly, VERY vulgar and VERY self-indulgent.
Thankfully Drive Angry is also just as much goofy, campy fun as its title, premise and star promises as well. It’s not high art but it is a damn good time if you’re in the right mood and can appreciate a movie that gives Halloween III: Season of the Witch hunk Tom Atkins the star treatment, including an appropriately iconic introduction.
Seven years after Drive Angry flopped Cage returned to this subject matter with 2018’s Mandy, another instant cult movie about a tormented soul at war with an evil cult that has hurt someone close to him.
But where Drive Angry is proudly, defiantly b-movie trash, drive-in pulp for a post-drive-in era Mandy aspires to pop art. It’s not just another bloody, ultra-violent action movie about a man at war with forces of pure evil, it’s a masterpiece with a genuine emotional core of sadness, grief and desperate yearning.
Cage doesn’t act in Drive Angry. He does his crazy Nicolas Cage shtick but his crazy Nicolas Cage shtick proves wildly, predictably entertaining.
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