Drive Angry: Shot In 3D

Drive Angry: Shot In 3D (2011)

47% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 97 reviews)

Runtime: 104 minutes

Directed by: Patrick Lussier

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Amber Heard, William Fitchner, Billy Burke

From: Summit Entertainment

Here’s a genre movie which is doing worse at the box office than expected, and that’s a damn shame. It’s not a surprise, as this sort of film in the past few years haven’t done well at the box office; for example, Grindhouse, Piranha 3D, Machete, and so on and so forth. Like I said, it’s a shame.

Going in, I wasn’t sure about the whole supernatural aspect of the movie; the ads on TV seemed to neglect the whole aspect that Nic Cage literally escaped from Hell and Fitchner was dispatched to hunt him down and bring him back. Yet, after watching it, everything somehow worked.

As you probably understand from seeing the trailers, Nic Cage (playing Milton) literally escapes from Hell in order to save his granddaughter (not daughter, as you probably inferred from said trailers); he connects up with Amber Heard in a sweet ’69 Dodge Charger, and they go after the Satanists who wish to do harm to the granddaughter; the leader of the Satanists is the charismatic Jonah King (Burke). And, as I said already, The Accountant (Fitchner) is on a mission to bring Milton back to Hell.

Not that I’ve seen too many films from the 70’s that have the trashy Grindhouse motif. The one that I did review was Race With The Devil, back in November of ’09. I wish I would have said more about it at the time, but alas. That film dealt with Satanists also, and various people have compared Race with Drive Angry. With this movie, the 3D looks pretty nice, there are attractive and often busty women (including Heard and Katy Mixon, who definitely fills the “busty” requirement), entertaining and often graphic violence, and there’s dark humor too.

The highlight of the movie is a scene lasting a few minutes which is all done in slow motion. I won’t give more away than that, but it’s SO out there, it’s genius. The story is not something you want to spend a lot of time thinking about, but that’s fine. As long as you ignore some logical points, you should really enjoy this. Heard is not some whimpering sidekick who gets in the way; she’s a tough chick who’ll probably kick your ass. It’s touches like that (and some things that happen in the climax) which especially made me enjoy this.

I'll be back Monday night with a new review.