Review: Drive Angry 3D

Grade: C

Upside: Visceral gory action and gratuitous nudity, with sly self-awareness, that's sure to please fans of 21st century grindhouse flicks like Machete.

Downside: Generally unoriginal with archetypal characters and falls flat when trying to add any depth.

I can imagine the pitch for Summit Entertainment's new Nicolas Cage vehicle, Drive Angry (Shot in 3D!): 21st Century Grindhouse! It’s The Crow meets Death Proof!

Tarantino would’ve killed to direct this in his heyday.

Unfortunately, the duty of directing one of the purest examples of 70’s era B-movie schlock in years falls to Direct-to-DVD vet Patrick Lussier. In Drive Angry, Lussier directs Nicolas Cage through ridiculously violent and brazen revenge fantasy. Cage plays the cleverly—to some—named John Milton, an escapee from Hell dead set on saving his granddaughter from slimy six-gun slinging Satanist Jonah King (Twilight’s Billy Burke). Milton is accompanied on his roaring rampage of vengeance by Amber Heard’s Piper, a Southern-fried pistol and dead ringer for Friday Night Lights’ Tyra Collette. Tailing Milton and Piper is a snarky soul collector known only as the Accountant, played by perennial ‘That Guy’ William Fichtner with his usual ticks turned up to 100.

Fichtner is not the only one who has turned the intensity up for this flick. Everything about Drive Angry is beyond over-the-top. From the cartoonish violence to the abundant nudity, this flick operates almost exclusively on Badass Logic and slavishly follows the Rule of Cool. Whether this works largely depends on your taste and tolerance for the hallowed conventions of grindhouse cinema. Taken at face value, Drive Angry’s hard ‘R’ qualities—including gunshots to the eye, a shootout during sex (ripped straight from another 21st century big budget B-movie, 2007’s Shoot’em Up) and a plethora of limbs destroyed by buck shots—could be appalling. Thankfully, the makers of Drive Angry don’t take the material seriously and the sly awareness of the flick’s B-movie roots makes it more digestible than it has any right to be.

The performances, on the other hand, are much harder to swallow. Cage hams it up, as usual, with his trademark stilted delivery that ranges from quirky cool to laughably explosive. Heard fares a little better, playing Piper with just the right amount of spunk of vulnerability to avoid be grating. Burke and Fichtner do serviceable jobs as antagonists, but neither brings anything original to characters that most audiences have seen before, which is the main problem with Drive Angry.

There’s nothing new here. Lussier does competent work that is at times thrilling, but is mostly a series of shots, characters and plot points that even the most casual moviegoers would recognize. One would think that with carte blanche to go balls-to-the-wall Lussier and his team would be a bit more creative. If Lussier couldn’t give the flick a bit more originality, at least he could’ve given it some depth. Sadly, anytime Drive Angry tries to switch gears and show some character growth or even something resembling real emotion, it falls flat. Trust me, it’s never a good sign when the audience laughs at the most dramatic scenes. Despite these failings, Drive Angry succeeds in being exactly what it seems to be on the tin: a total turn-off-your-brain experience in 3D(which is noticeably clearer and more effective than recent 3D releases, thanks to some cool effects with objects shooting towards the audience). If you can manage to ignore the B-movie styling, unoriginal characters and rehashed plot, or you just love movies like Machete or Death Proof then Drive Angry is right up your alley. If not, it’d be your best interest to drive away from this undercooked revenge flick.