Drive Angry: Critic Reviews

Cage has forged his own hell, and it's called: the movies he's addicted to making, even when they trash his brand.

Makes a loud, incoherent but oddly compelling case for the enhancing effects of stereoscopic projection on certain treasured objects of the cinematic gaze, like classic Detroit muscle cars, women's breasts and Nicolas Cage.

In one astonishing scene Cage has sex with a naked cocktail waitress while swigging from the bottle of Jack Daniel's in one hand and killing six assailants with the gun he's holding in the other. Now that's real multitasking.

Entirely ridiculous, in appalling taste and often very entertaining.

Even at its most lurid, though, the movie is a little dull. And it only gets less compelling as the backstory fills in.

It must be handed to Nicolas Cage. He continues to boldly go where few actors willingly do: the Dumpster. His career now is almost completely reverse-engineered.

Drive Angry is pure grindhouse, so committed to its own junkiness that it is, in its way, a pleasure to behold.

Drive Angry 3-Dis a movie so wantonly ridiculous, so aggressively stupid, it demands you make fun of it.

It is hard to imagine Drive Angry sustaining this level of trash-tastic hysterical hokum, and I regret to inform you that it does not, even with all of the above in 3-D.

It's the worst kind of bad: Boring bad.

I can't say I enjoyed it. But I can appreciate it. It offends every standard of taste except bad. But it is well made.

Another John Milton wrote: "Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven." Cage's character would concur, heartily, before reloading.

A trio of stridently weird performances -- from Nicolas Cage, William Fichtner, and David Morse -- brighten this otherwise rote actioner.

Sharp 3D lensing and low-octane camp humor help rev up Drive Angry.

Heard sets herself up as a Megan Fox with talent. And Cage? He delivers. Mock him for his bad choices if you will, but consider this. Who else could have made this work, or would even want to?

A movie that could have left skid marks on our psyche - in 3-D no less - instead drives us to distraction with verbose line readings that kill momentum worse than a police flashlight shining through a parked windshield.

I just wonder if these resources couldn't have been used for something, you know, actually good?

To its shameless credit, Drive Angry has a knack for stacking its cliches in mind-boggling arrangements.

The appeal of Drive Angry is much the same as that of Piranha: a willingness to revel in absurdity to the degree where the exhilaration is infectious.

There's hellfire and hot rods aplenty here, but a mindless exploitation entry that should have been appallingly awesome instead marshals too little style or intentional humor.

Being stoned or otherwise buzzed might help.

So awful it's almost great. But no, it's just awful.

It's actually refreshing that Lussier and Farmer don't belabor the film's internal mythology of satanic cults, hell and the devil's administrative assistants.

There isn't much to Vancouver-raised director Patrick Lussier's film besides mayhem and muscle cars, but he sure gets those things right.

A little respect, please, for His Satanic Majesty, Nicolas Cage. Nobody else could have made this work, or would have wanted to.