Offensive driving

By Joshua knopp/managing editor

Drive Angry set the record for the worst opening weekend of a 3-D film at just $1.6 million. While not exactly a good movie, it’s a shame it got so little audience attention.

Nicholas Cage offers to fix Amber Heard’s car early in Drive Angry. They then drive to Louisiana to save his granddaughter.

Drive Angry follows John Milton (Nicholas Cage), who has broken out of hell to save his granddaughter from being sacrificed by a satanic cult leader (Billy Burke). Milton drives angrily across the central United States, picking up attractive help (Amber Heard), evading a demonic agent sent after him (William Fichtner) and encountering old friends from when he was alive, including Webster (David Morse).

Drive Angry delivers on all the promises its commercials and Rrating give to the audience. Slow-motion action-violence is almost continuous throughout the film, and graphic doesn’t begin to describe the gore and sex sequences.

But unlike other films that claim visuals (blood, sex, muscle cars) as their main draw, Drive Angry also features a fantastic script and cast. The backstory is told at a measured pace, stretching a relatively small amount of information over the entire 104-minute duration. Cage is, as ever, a great actor who picks bad movies to star in, and Fichtner is brilliantly enigmatic in his role.

Most interestingly, however, is Drive Angry’s concept of hell as nothing more than a large extra-dimensional prison. It is visualized as a massive, grim castle with standard infernal décor when Milton is shown breaking out of it in the opening sequence. Demons are portrayed merely as wardens to this prison.

This interpretation adds a jail-break subtext to Milton’s character and is simply an interpretation of hell that has never been done before in film. With the disparate afterlives so easy to re-imagine and such a focus on humans in general, any new interpretation is a big plus.

There are a great number of good things about it, but Drive Angry is by no means a good movie. It is certainly entertaining and at times stimulating, but if a moviegoer is looking for something more than a good time, then they will find it unsuitable.