Day: December 12, 2011

I think Drive Angry is the last Nick Cage movie in the last few years (outside of Bangkok Dangerous) that I have not yet reviewed. I have come to expect a certain amount of apathy from some of his movies, but not all of them. For every Knowing, there is a Kick-Ass. For every Season of the Witch there is a Sorcerer’s Apprentice. So who knows what the next movie will be like? He forces you to watch them all, damn it.

Cage: The human embodiment of an enigma.

This review probably has some spoilers, but I doubt those reading it will care. The movie stars Cage as a man who has escaped from Hell. His daughter was killed by cultists, and they took his granddaughter, a baby, to be sacrificed in three days in order to bring Hell on Earth. Satanists! Also an enigmatic group of people. So he, along with his Godslayer (a gun that can remove a soul from existence, stolen from Satan) are on a quest to catch up with the cultists and end them completely. Or at least just Billy Burke, the head guy.

He meets up with Amber Heard and borrows her car / helps her out quickly on the journey. There is also The Accountant, played by William Fichtner, a mysterious suited man following Cage and trying to bring him back to Hell.

This movie is a grindhouse-like movie. It is gritty, over the top action, bad effects, all on purpose. But what made the other “Grindhouse” movies entertaining was that besides all of that, the plot was decent and the action was awesome. This isn’t true for Drive Angry. It had all of the right parts, but the plot and action I found to be pretty boring. As you would guess, there is a lot of driving and chasing too, and even that seemed lackluster.

When you take the words “Hell”, “Driving”, and “Nick Cage” together, most people are going to expect Ghost Rider, another bad movie, and not this. This is accidentally too close to Ghost Rider (not in plot, just in keywords). That seems like another mistake on Cage’s part.

Wait, is that him with a badass gun in Ghost Rider too? What the hell?

It is obvious what kind of movie they were going for. They definitely succeeded in that. But Drive Angry just is not as entertaining as the other films of that genre. Probably the real reason Cage has been in a lot of movies since this one, to cover it up.

Roland Emmerich. You all know him. He brought us the new Godzilla, Day After Tomorrow, and 10,000 BC. Sure, he also brought us Independence Day, but some people don’t like that (I do!). But not really the others. All over CGI’d disaster films (like ID4. Shh) or just overly CGI’d mess, if not a disaster. So, as expected, 2012 is pretty much the exact same thing.

“Welcome to Earth!” – Will Smith, narrating the movie.

Plot of the movie is simple enough to grasp. 2012 in December is the end of the world. Why? Mayans “predicted” it. Or they just stopped caring at least. Oh shit though. Large solar flares fucking up the earth. I think melting the core (err) or something, causing crustal shifts and other problems. Oh man, the poles end up switching, land breaks apart, and so many earthquakes guys. This leads to Yellowstone blowing up (a supervolcano) and a lot of tsunami’s from the earthquakes.

There ya go.

Some people knew this may happen a long time ago. So they began making “Arcs” to hold the rich, the powerful, and the brilliant, to recreate the world once all this shit happens. John Cusack, who was camping with his son and daughter in Yellowstone, heard crazy old Woody Harrelson talking about it all, and started to believe him. Similarly, GEOPHYSICIST played by Chiwetel Ejiofor is trying to get DC to evacuate and stuff.

We also have Danny Glover as the president, who is getting two old for this evacuation shit, and his daughter, Thandie Newton. Who else? None other than Oliver Platt as vague political guy who wants to save himself. Amanda Peet plays Cusack’s ex wife and Thomas McCarthy as new husband, boob doctor.

That is probably enough.

So as expected, this movie is a mess. It is actually 2.5 hours long, so you will get your disaster on hard and you will get it on long. I am a big fan of a geophysicist not only being an important part of the movie, but also a strong moral leader for the other characters. Normally since geophysicist are usually seen as godless people anyways, its good that this one could be that and a good person.

What else was kick ass? Woody Harrelson as crazy conspiracy nut.

Neither left nor right wing, this guy isn’t even a bird.

So what was the bad parts? I could do a long article about how scientifically some stuff is stupid. But I won’t. But seriously? The supervolcano was actually UNDER exaggerated when it exploded. Which is crazy for any movie to do, but I guess they wanted to have a plot afterwards as well.

But a bigger complaint to have, that in terms of “Disasters” they used the same device three times to show panic and running away. Meaning, on three separate occasions, with the same group of people, there was a panic to hurry and have their plane take off with not much runway. Three. Times. In a row, actually. Every place they went, until the final “oh now its hard to land” scene. There wasn’t much creativity there at all. Very aggravating.

Effects were okay. Kind of got tired of them killing off people just for the sake of killing someone, instead of any good real disaster reason. (See: When they first get on the Arc).

Oh well.