Drive Angry review by Adam Truscott

Director: Patrick Lussier
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Amber Heard, William Fichtner

The One Where Drive Angry (IN 3D!), Makes Me Wish Cage Dialed It Up To Eleven

Do you ever get that feeling that you’ve built something up in your head a little too much? Sometimes you’re forgiven, sometimes… well, you should have just seen it coming. And maybe asked for it yourself. “It” invariably being overkill. Too much of a good thing. Emo dance dance routines.

In the case of Drive Angry (they dropped the 3D from the title??), I should be forgiven.

Drive Angry (3D!), was touted to me, as Nic Cage, with crazy hair, in crazy mode. He’s escaped Hell, (yes, that one); to come back, rescue his Grand Daughter from a Satanic Cult. And he plans to drive… (*Looks at camera like Hot Tub Machine for the key word…*) ANGRY.

As a premise goes, I thought we would be in From Dusk Til Dawn country. I thought, “Anything would go”. I thought we would get to see Nic Cage swilling beer from the skull of his fallen enemy. Unfortunately, and underwhelmingly, we only get one of those things.

As a result, I left the cinema, and wanted to whack the car into fourth gear, and maybe go ten miles over the speed limit. But I never felt like driving angry. I never felt like trying to shoot someone’s tyres out with a gun I stole from Satan himself.

That’s a good thing? Well, yes and no. I love that feeling a film can give you, when you come out and do a karate kick at your best mate, because it got you in that zone. Not a violent kick. Just a playful one. Maybe just above knee height, but definitely below the nuts. When a film gets it right, like say, Fight Club, that’s when I come out and literally want to be that other person.

Drive Angry should have done that to me. But it never dials up to eleven. In fact, after the opening warning shot, where Cage takes off a goons gun hand ala Robocop, there was little else to make me think this was Herzog worthy craziness. And that means it wasted its premise, surely?

It’s a shame, as the 3D is pretty solid. The acting isn’t too shabby, either. Everyone is camping it up, and Cage is sleep walking, but there is only one scene that struck me as awful – maybe deliberately so? One Cult member (I’m concentrating real hard, so I type that right, especially in this context!), run out, trying to shoot at Cage. It’s awful. Her face just screams Z-Movie. Luckily a big car runs her over, again, Robocop style. So all is well.

That is my overriding feeling with this film. The violence goes for shocking, (some of the wounds in the aftermath are pretty gross, to be fair). In reality though, I sat there hoping for a more violent Directors Cut.

All is not lost, as towards the end, everyone seems to be on fire, naked, swearing, or drinking from skulls. I just wanted that all the way through. I wanted Nic Cage to be a little more tongue in cheek, channeling Con Air. Maybe it’s the hair.

There was certainly potential there. I guess it gave me a distraction from The Kings Speech* love in, which was what I wanted.

What I didn’t expect was that as part of my double bill, I would prefer I Am Number Four…

*Inspired by Mondo, this is my revised Kings Speech poster. Its renamed The Kings Sheep as it has created a flock that will go to screenings, and in a monotone voice, baa at the screen. It originally comes from my Shawshank Sheep theory, where the same famously happened back in the nineties.