(supplemental note: thanks to all of the google searches for "Drive Angry naked chick," the Cap'n has opted to digitally alter one of the pictures below. Sorry, but you'll have to perv out somewhere else.)
Drive Angry is the trashiest movie I've seen in a long time. Were it not for John Waters, one might argue that Drive Angry is the trashiest film I've ever seen, and even with that caveat, it's still impressive watching a film that just doesn't care whether you identify with (or even care about) anybody in the film. I could write about Drive Angry without SPOILERS, but then I would remove all incentive for you to see the film. Seeing as nobody went to see Drive Angry in the first place, I feel I owe it to the people involved making the film to send a few of you in the right direction, so SPOIL I shall.
John Milton (Nicolas Cage) is a man on a mission - specifically a mission to stop Jonah King (Billy Burke), a Satanic Cult Leader, from sacrificing his granddaughter during a full moon and unleashing Hell on Earth. Milton already has a bone to pick with King for murdering his daughter (a member of the cult) while the not-so-good-father was in "prison," so there's no way he's going to stop chasing the Satanists all the way from Colorado to Louisiana. The problem is that Milton keeps destroying / abandoning his muscle cars, so he picks up a ride from Piper (Amber Heard), the kind of girl that puts the "trash" in "trailer trash." Unfortunately for Milton, The Accountant (William Fichtner) has been sent to return him to "prison," and he's not going to take "no" for an answer...This first SPOILER isn't necessarily one depending on how easily you can pick up on an obvious image of John Milton's car speeding out of Hell. Yes, Hell; there's some quick exposition about how members of the cult could have sworn he was dead, and Milton seems to the ability to survive being shot in the eye at point blank range. That said, director / co-screenwriter Patrick Lussier (My Bloody Valentine 3D) and writer Todd Farmer (Jason X) find every way possible to avoid directly mentioning the central conceit of the film.
Nearly every person I mentioned Drive Angry to didn't know that Nicolas Cage's John Milton escapes from Hell to save the baby, and all of them were more interested in the film when they found out. It seems to me that if you want to market a "grindhouse"-style movie, you might want to include that critical component in the marketing. Otherwise, it looks like another silly movie starring Nicolas Cage, like Season of the Witch (which preceded Drive Angry by only a month).
It's a shame, because Drive Angry is a lot more fun than Season of the Witch, and for that matter many Nicolas Cage films people have been avoiding since Ghost Rider*. I sense that more people would tune in if they knew that Drive Angry had a more ludicrous hook. Mind you, the hook, while never directly spelled out, is crystal clear for anyone paying attention. The Accountant's ability to manufacture phony FBI badges by flipping a coin, or the fact that he tells nearly everybody he meets when he'll "see" them again should be a dead giveaway. If, for some reason, it isn't, hopefully the "God Killer," a giant handgun that Milton steals during his escape, will give you the hint this isn't your average "chase" film.
Fichtner steals the show as the unflappable Accountant, and is easily the preferred antagonist to Burke's Jonah King. It isn't just that Fichtner easily owns every scene he's in; Jonah King is such an ill-defined villain that you a) never know what he's really trying to do, and b) never feel threatened by him. Other than having coke fingernails and shooting his revolver like a cowboy, all King does is talk about his "new world order" and watch his followers kill (or get killed).
At one point, without having done anything to demonstrate it, King boldly proclaims that he is "armored with a power that you will never know" and that "nothing of this Earth can kill me." However, other than having a bit of a fight with Piper in an RV, the only other information we have about Jonah King is that people keep stabbing him with his Satanic Pendant and that Milton's daughter bit his penis off.
Did I mention this was a trashy movie? The kind of movie where Piper knocks out the girl her boyfriend Frank (Todd Farmer) is cheating with in the middle of a trailer park, and then some fat guy walks up, smirking, and snaps a picture of the naked girl. The kind of movie where a guy is, for no apparent reason, wearing a wig that looks like... you know what? Why don't I show you. A picture is worth far more than any description I could give you (and also mostly NSFW):
Lussier shot Drive Angry in 3D, and it shows early on, even if I saw it in 2D; there are quite a few "coming at the camera" gags but things seem to settle down quickly, which may or may not have improved watching it without the gimmick**. Lussier and Farmer explore similar subplots to their remake of My Bloody Valentine (a film I must admit I didn't enjoy much); Drive Angry is their not only does Farmer once again play a mostly naked guy chasing a totally naked girl through a parking lot, but Tom Atkins (Night of the Creeps, The Fog) appears as a police chief that is largely ineffectual in his pursuit of Milton.
Drive Angry is less of a remake than an homage (of sorts) to films like Race with the Devil, although that's not the only place it borrows from. A sex scene with Milton and Candy (Charlotte Ross) quickly turns into a gunfight, and the fact that Milton doesn't stop having sex would be more impressive if I hadn't already seen Shoot 'Em Up, which is already more of a cartoon than anything in Drive Angry.
That said, I have one more image from Drive Angry, from a promise made by Milton too silly not to pay off at the end of the film. Someone asks him if he wants a beer, and Milton says "not unless I drink it out of King's skull." So after he sends his granddaughter off to be raised by Piper (a horrible idea, as anyone who watched the movie should know), we get his promise fulfilled.
The best part about this is how nonchalant Cage, Fichtner, and Lussier treat the "skull drinking," as though we shouldn't be surprised this is happening at this point. Then again, Drive Angry is exactly the kind of movie not to make much ado of skull drinking. And that, my friends, is trashy in all the right ways.* Including the actually, not-being-ironic-when-I-say-this-no-really-I-mean-it, really good Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which is trashy in a different way but again let me stress that it's a WERNER HERZOG film so maybe you should rethink your whole "that movie has to suck" prejudgment. ** I can't imagine it made anyone who paid an extra $5 for the glasses happier, since there are huge chunks of the movie where 3D would have been negligible a best.
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