-Escape. Refresh. Enjoy.- Just another single-word, three-sentence slogan from the corporate keepers to remind you not to invest too much anticipation in anything they produce, but to kick back and relax and mock the show.
Drive Angry 3D is one of those useless ‘things’ they produce, and it serves only to reinforce what history has taught us. Namely, 3D movies were an abysmal failure in the ’50s, a pathetic reinvention in the ’80s, and now an insulting re-re-re-invention in recent years.
Nick Cage leads this exhibition with as little effort as he can muster, sporting black jacket and dark sunglasses, highlighted hair and a case full of scissors and antique guns and a vial of beads? He’s a rogue who escaped from hell with something called the “god killer,” a gun that rips apart demigods’ and cult leaders’ skulls, shooting their souls into a rift of dark clouds in the sky that results finally in nonexistence. Protagonist John Milton, the 17th century poet of such lovely poesy as,
“Hail, divinest Melancholy!
Whose saintly visage is too bright hue
To hit the sense of human sight,
And therefore to our weaker view
O’erlaid with black, staid Wisdom’s hue,”
is being trailed by the mysterious Accountant (William Fichtner), who likens himself to the Christ, but drives a hydrogen truck through a pile of police officers. The Accountant is a grim reaper-type murderer who reveals casually the date of several bystanders’ deaths, as if the info were a hot tip from the future. He also offers a man a bottle of wine and says: “Would you like some water?”
Avoid this movie like the plague! Fichtner (Entourage, Armageddon, Malcolm X), with only a vague, sardonic cliché from hell to work with, strives to make the disaster bearable, but writers Farmer and Lussier are misogynistic maniacs who rely on being as bluntly shocking and intentionally distasteful as possible.
At one point Cage puffs a Cohiba with a bottle of Jack Daniels in hand and mows down machete- and rifle-wielding goons, all the while having his way with a blonde prostitute. This series of disappointments offends every taste imaginable, but also manages to sidestep any semblance of entertainment or cinema. The film fails even as a bad joke, along with most other work the screenwriter and director have undertaken in the short time since they began their careers (primarily horror home videos, cable TV and Hollywood fringe crew spots).
The movie doesn’t even provide a satisfying ending; the entire thing consists of sickening violence throughout, dodging any attempt at meaning or sense. The Paradise Lost author fights bitterly, ending hundreds of lives to save his granddaughter from a Jim Jones cult-style sacrifice. Upon the infant’s rescue, he holds her for a few seconds, then passes her off to the beautiful Amber Heard to raise and love, then pretends to die to rid himself of both women for whom he had spent the entire thing fighting!
Cage returns to life once again only to drink wine from the top half of Billy Burke’s skull and cruise away in a hot rod from the Inferno with Death/Jesus riding shotgun. It literally sounds like I’m making this up. I’m not. Dear Hollywood: None of us are laughing.
