Tag Archives: Nicholas Cage Month

I knew, ahead of time, when I started on the Nicolas Cage-em-up theme for a month that this was going to be the movie I did last. I knew, because I knew that I thought really well of this movie, that there was a definite here here. That there was a story I remembered seeing – like, in 2007 – and that I had the sort of lurched, sunk-in feeling in my gut that the movie I’d seen had been something. That it was impressive and dark and also weirdly funny, but I somehow couldn’t remember the finale, couldn’t remember the end clearly.

Coming back to it, I realised the reason I couldn’t remember the end clearly, because the ending isn’t clear. It just goes on.

And that’s the point.

If you’re looking for a recommendation and want to see if you should bother with movies, going in blind, you should absolutely check out Lord Of War if you can handle a violent, drug-addled movie about guns and death and the idea of industrialised human harm and atrocities. This movie is cynical in a way few stories manage, and dark in a way that few actors can pull off.

And Nicolas Cage is pretty much perfect in this movie.

Talking about Drive Angry runs the risk of becoming just a list of what you might have heard described as Holy Shit Moments. Honestly it’s a problem that plagues a lot of the Nicolas Cage ouvre, where this actor who’s particularly good at throwing himself into roles and who seemingly has a neverending appetite for work keeps getting handed movies which continually push the limits of a sensible creative’s idea of hey, should I maybe say no to this? It’s only due to licensing and availability that meant I didn’t look at all these Nicolas Cage movies well into October, with titles like Wicker Man (the beees), Colour Out of Space (and trust me, I thought about it), Mandy and Willy’s Wonderland all making up easily an entire October of Dread-themed Nicolas Cage movies, all of which would probably be easier to talk about than Drive Angry.

But here we are.

Drive Angry is a movie about Nicolas Cage as a man who escaped from hell with Satan’s own gun to save his infant granddaughter. In the simplest possible way to describe it, this movie does nothing special and nothing new. It is a structurally coherent movie where you can basically summarise it as ‘dude chases after thing, almost gets it, gets it, story end. It is a pop song of a movie, three minutes or ninety minutes of exactly what you expect based on the opening few bars and then you have to decide if that’s for you or for not.

It is important to talk about Drive Angry in this anodyne way because if you don’t, you kind of have to talk about it as an experience and then all the coherent words go out the fucking window.

All my friends know the low rider.

Nicolas Cage movies never feel like they’re doing anything exciting or novel as much as they are the kind of pipework and standard model that all other movies are riffing off. If you’ve never seen the type of movie in the genre before, any given Nic Cage movie is going to blow your mind, but by default, he’s not doing challenging work as much as he is doing fun work. The kinds of movies he chooses to do — well, I guess it seems like it’s more about who bothers to call him, the man will star in anything it seems — do not seem very avant garde or surprising. It means the man serves as a sort of grading label on any given movie, something that gets to be enjoyable to watch and maybe crests into very funny, but by default if they put Nicolas Cage on the poster, the movie you’re getting won’t be that complicated.

Before Fast And The Furious was an extremely muscular meme, that meme lived and breathed in Gone In 60 Seconds.

This movie is sort of high water mark for this sort of floor-and-ceiling of Nicolas Cage Quality principle: Gone In 60 Seconds is a dumb movie with poop jokes and weirdly PG-rated criminals, and it’s a pretty good time.

Your narrative: Nicolas Cage is Nicolas Cage, the best car thief who ever car thiefed, but he left that life behind. His kid brother, however, didn’t, and now he’s in trouble, so he needs his brother to save him, through Car Thiefing. He proceeds to do so, with some complication.

That’s it, that’s the tweet.