Bat Outta Hell By Christina Harlin, your Fearless Young Orphan Drive Angry (2011) Directed by Patrick Lussier This is a grindhouse movie, not a street racing film, but how far is driving angry from driving fast and furious, anyway? Nic Cage spends most of the movie zooming around in various, awesome classic muscle cars, wrecking the shit out of them as he drives in hot, angry pursuit of the cult leader who kidnapped his granddaughter. Yes, granddaughter. Nic’s daughter was beheaded by Billy Burke (of TV’s Revolution), and her infant daughter was stolen to be used in a nasty ritual to open the doors of Hell on Earth. If that’s not nutty enough for you, then consider this: Nic plays a soul who himself escaped from Hell to perform this rescue, stealing a magic gun that will kill gods (why would a deity possess such a thing?). See, Nic’s actually been dead for years. (Ahem, this is surely why he doesn’t look nearly old enough to be a grandfather, um, right?) Escaping from Hell can’t be easy; luckily they don’t have to explain how it all happened. It just did. Still not crazy enough for you? Okay, I’ll go you one better. William Fichtner, he of the vaguely creepy face, is the Accountant, the Devil’s mercenary sent to retrieve Nic’s soul. Wearing a natty, spotless suit, he saunters after Nic with the detached interest of a guy who has a job to do but doesn’t mind taking in the sights while he’s out and about. Nic has come to mean something very special to me. He and I have a long, bumpy history, but now he’s like my insane uncle. Yes, he has some lucid times, but mostly he’s convinced that the government is after him because he knows about the secret psi-ops experiments, and he’s a real hoot to have around at the family reunion. His movies are not guaranteed so-bad-they’re-good. It’s not that simple. His movies have become a study in incredulity. I think he releases ten films a year and nine of them feel like mysteries that must be solved. Why does this movie fail? Could it have been saved? What the hell were they thinking? What is up with his hair? Is this actually a joke and I’m just not sophisticated enough to get it? I predict that sometime in the future, the squids who rule the Earth will find a codex in Nic’s sarcophagus, which deciphers his movie career into a series of apocalyptic predictions. He’ll be the Nostradamus – the Nicstrodamus, if you will – of the new age of squid society. But in the meantime, we’ve got Drive Angry to discuss. It’s a ridiculous film. It’s possibly a parody that didn’t quite get the tone right – it’s over the top, but not enough. There is something brilliant lurking around in here. I love the idea of it. A grandfather crawling out of Hell to save his granddaughter, and doing so with a godkiller gun and a lot of badass cars? That’s awesome! Alongside him rides Amber Heard, a gorgeous young actress I like very much. She is a truck stop waitress where Nic has stopped to get some black coffee with sugar (he’s quite specific about it). She quits her job when the manager feels her up. She gives Nic a ride back into town when he fixes her car, but there she finds that her boyfriend is porking someone else. In a fit of pique (“pique” meaning she kicks the shit out of people) she races off with Nic because he seems to be . I don’t know, doing something interesting, maybe. Once she’s on board with his chase, she’s totally committed, though. Reasons be damned. What was she going to do, go to college? Billy Burke’s cult is a strange lot. They’re quite stupid, the lot of them. They’re traveling by RV to some mystical place where baby sacrifice is best conducted (mark it on your maps!). At a trashy motel, Nic kills about nineteen of them while he is mid-coitus with a curvy, screaming woman. (Please note, this movie is not forward-thinking when it comes to gender roles.) Then at a roadside church, where the cult has stopped to have an impromptu prayer meetin’, he kills more of them, and then they kill him. They shoot him right through the eye and abduct Amber, as she screams for her Nicmeister! Haha, here’s the joke: you can’t kill a dead man. Nick gets up, shakes it off, and keeps on going. The road chases go on interminably. They are not especially exciting. This movie is at its best when William Fichtner is having fun being the Accountant, or when Nic gets to try explaining himself and his actions, or when Billy Burke is preaching nonsense, or when Amber Heard is inexplicably worshipping Nic Cage, a weirdo she only met the previous day but for whom she is willing to risk her life. That’s the good stuff. Cars roaring up and down the road aren’t very interesting in and of themselves, unless they are extensions of the characters (i.e., the better entries in the Fast and Furious franchise). I can only keep this bizarre tale in the “Fast and Furious” category because the cars do figure into the choices made and are quite often used as handy killing tools. I remember ads for this movie. I don’t know about you, but the ones I saw only implied that this was an action film. They didn’t mention anything about Hell or granddaughters. It was made out to be something like Taken with Nic Cage after the people who had hurt his daughter. I wonder what audience members No way is that going to pass inspection. thought when they got to the film and learned what was really going on. To this humble movie fan, this is way weirder than any stupid Taken movie, and thus more interesting. My movie buddy was not entertained at all. He found Drive Angry distasteful. I was more forgiving. It is sometimes distasteful, and I do think it misses its intentions. The problem is entirely a matter of tone. Nic and company are either taking events far too seriously, or not nearly seriously enough. We fall shy of real parody, we fall short of tense action, we fall behind on thrills. But there is something to be said for its outlandish intentions. I respect outlandish intentions even when they fail. Reach for the stars, Nic! Plus I have this affection for bizarre films that don’t come out quite right. I like to poke at them and see what happens. In the future, when the squids find the Nic Cage codex, it will be full of things I already suspected, even back in these Dark Ages. .