Drive Angry Review

• 6th Jul 2011

It’s fair to say that Drive Angry’s writer/director Patrick Lussier can be accused of creating something that is trying too hard to be cool, and anything that has to strive for cool can’t ever truly be cool. But ‘cool’ is a subjective thing – no one tries harder than Lady Gaga, and plenty of people think she’s cool. Besides, despite its obvious attempts to be accepted by the in-crowd, Drive Angry is a fantastic bad-on-purpose film.

Notoriously, Drive Angry crashed spectacularly both at the box office and with critics, but there was a small number of B-movie fans who recognised Lussier as a fellow traveller and Drive Angry as an attempt to recapture the spirit of the drive-in. If there’s any justice in this world then the DVD release will swell their numbers and allow this bombastic, flawed gem to assume its rightful place in the cult canon.

An atypically subdued Nicolas Cage plays Milton, a man who’s escaped the confines of Hell in order to stop his infant granddaughter from being sacrificed to Satan by cult leader Jonah King (Billy Boyd). Yes, the cult leader is “Jo King”, and he’s wearing Jim Morrison’s wardrobe and a pentagram pendant that the women he attempts to assault keep stabbing him in the face with.

Milton sets off across Oklahoma, aided only by Piper, a diner waitress with a right-hook that would fell an elephant (Amber Heard), and a weapon known as ‘The God Killer’. They’re in a race against time and The Accountant – the minion of Hell sent to fetch Milton back.

The dapper, scene-stealing Accountant is played by one of my all-time favourite actors, William Fichtner. It’s worth owning this DVD just so that on a whim you can enjoy his weird, hilarious line readings and the scene in which he drives a truck laden with hydrogen at a police road block while grooving out to KC and the Sunshine Band’s That’s the Way I Like It. On the page, “Hey, you. Fuck face” doesn’t have much to recommend it, but Fichtner delivers it as though he’s reciting a Zen riddle.

This isn’t to say that Cage doesn’t get some Cage-like moments of his own. While there are no Wickerman-esque freakouts, he does get to advise his one-night stand that he “never disrobes before gunplay” before engaging in a protracted, slow-mo fire fight with the Satanists who burst into their bedroom, all without ever succumbing to coitus interruptus or dropping his booze.

Nothing in the plot makes much sense, the women are all gorgeous and hornier than Colin Farrell on Viagra (“Suit yourself,” guffaws Piper to Milton as she heads off with a barman, “but no one reaches the end and says ‘I wish I hadn’t fucked so much’”), the cars, as befits a film called Drive Angry, are epic hymns to the glory of the 1970s US automotive industry, the gore is everywhere, the cops are stupid, and the Satanists are prone to dancing naked around fires. Either you will love this or think it’s totally dumb: either way, it’s a future classic.

Clare Moody