Nicolas Cage's Dry Hump: Drive Angry Reviewed

By AP KRYZA

Release the Cage! Nic's latest was screened at the last possible moment, mere hours before its national opening today. Here's our review:

Drive Angry

WW Critic's Score: 42

Nicolas Cage with a bad Art Alexakis mullet, playing a killer who escapes from hell. Deranged cultists wielding objects that are blunt, sharp and explosive (sometimes all three). A badass '69 Charger, dismemberment, explosions, vulgarity, impalement, rampant nudity, fist fights, fire fights, knife fights, cat fights, naked cat fights. Amber Heard's ass. Amber Heard's ass in slick 3-D.

So how is it that the knuckle-dragging adrenaline-fest Drive Angry isn't the greatest fucking movie of all time?

For starters, it's never fun to watch someone cash a paycheck, no matter how many bodies he fells on his way to the ATM. Drive Angry should be a riot for the maniacal Cage, a chance to make his Bad Lieutenant junkie seem like Fred Rogers. Instead, he's at his most stoic (read: dull) since Con-Air, a fantastically superior piece of crap that saw Cage's hero take a backseat to scenery chewing John Malkovich and a parade of lunatics. Here, as a vengeful father literally playing bat out of hell, he hardly seems awake, even during a scene where he engages in a gunfight without pulling out of the skanky truckstop hooker he's banging.

The great William Fichtner almost saves the show as "The Accountant," a dapper minion of Satan with a Cary Grant suit, a Christopher Walken cadence and a penchant for embedding quarters in hillbillies' heads. Unlike Cage, he seems to be having a ball, as does Heard, who steals a few scenes as a scrappy white-trash sexpot.

Alas, director Patrick Lussier (My Bloody Valentine 3D) believes all it takes to craft a good grindhouse throwback is grainy film stock and lots of blood and skin. He’s so enamored with the sheer volume of trash he tosses at the screen that he forgets to be fun or clever in the process (maybe he should have texted Machete for advice). The film even skimps on the car chases, an unforgivable sin for a flick with “drive” in the title. The only thing Drive Angry really shows us is what a bunch of witless meatheads can do when they have a bunch of guns, explosives, naked chicks, $50,000,000, and a 3D camera. R. 

Drive Angry opens today; see showtimes here.

WWeek 2015

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