Patrick Lussier | 104 mins | Blu-ray | 1.78:1 | USA / English | 18 / R
Nic Cage does the Taken thing with added CGI and supernatural posturing in this grindhouse-y actioner from the director of such inspiring films as The Prophecy 3, Dracula 2001 and the My Bloody Valentine remake.
The grindhouse style works for it. It’s got a crazy plot, crazy action, gratuitous violence, gratuitous nudity, rough production values, variable acting, loopy bad guys — the highlight is definitely the latter, with William Fichtner channelling Christopher Walken. The whole thing could do with being punchier and pacier, and shorter, but the out-there action, some bits of dialogue, and Fichtner make it almost worthwhile. None of it is especially memorable, but while it lasts it’s appreciably trashy.
That said, the sex scene fight is a steal from Shoot ‘Em Up, and not a very good steal. Slow-mo saps it of all tension or excitement. Other action scenes fare better, but by no means all of them. Edited by the director and his brother, I think they need to learn some new tricks to punch these scenes up a bit. It gets better as the film goes on and they have crazier material, but some of the early stuff is remarkably pedestrian.
The film’s promotion made a big point of being shot in 3D (instead of the usual style of “Drive Angry 3D”, the posters call it “Drive Angry Shot in 3D”), but most of the in-your-face “look it’s 3D!” stuff is CGI anyway. So would it benefit from being seen in 3D? 
Only in that stuff flies at the camera and whatnot. You can indeed tell it was made for 3D, but that doesn’t mean it needs it. Indeed, the poke-the-audience stuff aside, none of it suggests it would look great in 3D — for all the pointlessness of cinema’s new money-spinning format, it can add something to the vistas in a film like Avatar. Drive Angry has nothing vaguely on that level.
These days your big blockbusters won’t get you change from $200m, so at $50m Drive Angry is a cheapy – which at least explains some of its low-rent looks. But it’s not that cheap, and the CGI is appalling. Some of it was of the level I’d expect from a direct-to-DVD mockbuster, and those are made for closer to $50 than $50m. In spite of the low cost, it did spectacularly badly at the box office. Even though it sold itself as “Starring Film Star Nicolas Cage” and “look there’s action!” and “look there’s a sexy girl!” (these are the three main things you get from the poster, and I imagine the trailers also), it opened a paltry 9th at the US box office and took just $28.9m… worldwide. Total. That’s only about 60% of its budget. Its poor performance makes it “the lowest-grossing opening of a 3D film released in over 2,000 US theatres”. Unlike some low-budget flops (Dredd 3D, I’m looking at you), this commercial failure doesn’t really bother me.
As noted, director Lussier does not have an inspiring CV: he started with numerous straight-to-video sequels, then a big screen sequel-no-one-wanted (even with Nathan Fillion in it) in White Noise: The Light, before what I guess must’ve been a modicum of success with My Bloody Valentine, which I seem to remember a (relatively) big fuss being made about because it was one of the first live-action things in true 3D or somesuch. Perhaps the massive flopping of Drive Angry will kill his career back off — his next project is apparently re-make threequel Halloween III, which I don’t imagine anyone anywhere is eagerly anticipating.
Drive Angry isn’t completely without merit, but it’s the kind of film where you have to hunt for the good stuff among the dross. Even as brain-off actioners go, you can do better.
This review is part of the 100 Films Advent Calendar 2012. Read more here.
Chatroom is born of — or, at least, partly formed around — trying to find a viable way of depicting the world of online chatrooms on film. Putting on film this world it As It Really Is — people sat at a computer typing at each other — might work well enough for a single scene in 
in this environment is also truthful. There have been many reviews that are completely dismissive of this facet of the film, leaving me to wonder if they were written by people who haven’t used or experienced such things. It’s a shame, then, that the film’s degeneration into a thriller hides the arguably-worthwhile potential to explain to such people what that online world can be like for people/kids using it.
Despite a strong-ish start, perhaps the whole second half of the film is a wobbly mess; not directionless exactly, because by then it does know broadly where it’s going, but it doesn’t do much to suggest to the viewer that it has a real goal in mind. Character motivations and relationships feel as if they’ve not been fully thought out, or at least not fully brought together on screen. Some threads take inexplicable jumps; others aren’t adequately explained or justified. Occasionally it’s Nakata’s direction that overdoes things, for instance laying the soppy “this bit is emotional” music on thick when Matthew Beard’s performance could easily carry a particular sequence.
The aforementioned Matthew Beard, perhaps the least recognisable cast member (his 
Michael Mann is arguably best known for his modern, urban, slick, intricate crime thrillers — films like 
Should we long for a Director’s Cut, then? Maybe that would be an improvement, but I’m not convinced it would be good per se. You see, the film doesn’t just stick to giving us Nazis vs Whatever The Keep Contains, oh no. First the SS turn up, led by a Properly Evil Nazi, played straight by Gabriel Byrne. Escalation, great. Then there’s Ian McKellen as a professor drafted in to make sense of the keep’s mysteries. Also great — even the Good Nazi is going to have to die, right? Who better to root for than a saved-from-a-concentration-camp Jewish professor.
There are plus points, but they all come with a commensurate downside. The creature is well-realised at first, with some nice animated effects that are more effective than much of the over-cooked CGI spectacle we’d get today. The more we see of him, however, the less power he holds — he ends up essentially a very tall man. OK, it’s a bit better than that makes it sound, but the mysterious billowing smoke was spookier. The film on the whole is nicely shot, with some real standout moments of cinematography. But slow-mo and a smoke machine both get overused by the end, lending many of the visuals a tacky ’80s edge.
One thing the film never manages to be is remotely scary. It’s not aiming for cheap jump- or gore-based shocks (although there is a little goriness, it’s quite light; triply so by today’s standards), but it doesn’t manage any significant senses of dread or creepiness. As noted, early on it seems to be heading in the right direction — even the secluded mountain village, nestled in a harsh landscape but with greener-than-green grass and garishly painted houses, and towered over by the foreboding slab of stone that is the titular structure, is an uncanny start — but it never makes good on the promise.
I would love to join their ranks, because there are numerous exciting ideas and moments of quality filmmaking to be found here; but I won’t be, because there’s too much muddled dross packed in around them. The result is that quite-rare thing: a decidedly mediocre film that I’m actually glad I’ve seen. But, unless someone wants to hire me for that remake, never again.
The Other Guys sounded like a great concept; so great I overlooked the fact it’s from the director of the massively over-rated 
Everyone loves The Rock and Jackson; no one likes Ferrell and Wahlberg; and they’re not assigned the case, they stumble upon it. Wouldn’t it have been more fun if everyone actually hated The Big Damn Heroes who make it hard for the regular guys to do their job? If a pair of normal detectives were assigned The Big Case and had to prove themselves worthy? Maybe even put the Super Pair in the shade, rather than killing them off in the first act?
The Saint’s gone on vacation indeed — with 
Apparently the villains are Nazis, though there’s absolutely nothing to suggest that here (again, that’s something I’ve since read online). The Saint knows both the villain and a Mysterious Woman of old, but it’s never explained how or why or what their relationships are. It’s like a set of stock adventure-story elements assembled without any understanding of how or why they should connect, which makes for an unsatisfying and unenthralling experience.
The rest of the cast don’t offer much compensation. Arthur Macrae as the Saint’s cowardly friend Monty is no replacement for the parade of ex-cons he formerly hired as manservants, while Sally Gray of 
After two fun adventures, here RKO’s series turns in my least favourite film to star George Sanders as the Saint.
Helene Whitney is fine in this role, but her character’s not a patch on 
In a dystopian church-ruled future (could there be any other kind of church-ruled world), in which a war between men and vampires raged for centuries but has recently been settled (in man’s favour), no-longer-needed warrior-priest Paul Bettany is called upon to go against his vows and leave the city to rescue his niece after her parents are murdered and she is kidnapped in a vampire attack. I could go on, but it’s the kind of plot that sounds far more complicated in a short summary than it is to watch on screen.
And after all that meandering, the story is a bit rushed. It tries to generate character and tension, but hasn’t spent enough time building them to earn it. There’s lots of awful dialogue, flooded with clichés… as is a lot of the plot, and the stock dystopian future setting, and the overuse of slow-mo. There’s some ideas with promise, but they’re largely shunted aside in favour of something from The Big Book of Standard Character Arcs. And I say “promising” — you know exactly how they’d play if the filmmakers had bothered to make more out of them.
None of this is helped by weak acting, which considering the largely quality cast is probably down to the script and direction. How unlikely is Paul Bettany as an action leading man, eh? I thought Jason Statham was odd enough… And if you want a preview of 
Priest isn’t bad per se — well, depending on your tolerance levels. It’s no 
Belated sequels are often the worst kind, an actor/director/studio returning to past glories in the hope of creating new success. Even when they work, they’re not a patch on the original. (I’m sure there must be exceptions, but nothing comes to mind.) The third entry in the 
It’s ostensibly a thriller (albeit a comedy-action-thriller) and so there are plot twists, but they’re wholly predictable. It also lacks clarity in its villain, I felt — who it is, what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and so on. It weakens the film, especially the ending: there’s the usual big action climax, followed by a little bit of business that dilutes the impact of the ending. It’s just badly structured.
plus some sparing atop the Eiffel Tower (or, I presume, a surprisingly good set thereof) — is occasionally spectacular and single-handedly almost justifies the entire film’s existence. A car chase/fight through the streets of Paris is the other best bit, buoyed by both unusual choreography and Yvan Attal’s French taxi driver George, who’s probably the film’s best character.
Part coincidence (in that I happened to notice it), part forced appropriateness (in that I then chose to post it now), 2000 AD was originally released in Hong Kong 12 years ago yesterday, tying in to Chinese New Year the last time it was (as it is now) the year of the Dragon.
All that’s established in these parts could be done much more economically, which would result in far less viewer thumb-twiddling.
That might be being picky. The action feels slight at the time because it’s a good while coming, but in retrospect, considered on their own merits, there’s a lot of good stuff. There’s a good car chase, a couple of shoot-outs that err towards realism rather than balleticism (both have their merits, but something that feels realistically punchy is rarer), and a couple of solid punch-ups that play fairly nicely on the idea that our hero isn’t a martial arts expert. That concept isn’t mentioned in the film as much as it is in the DVD extras, but his style has a sort of scrambly feel that’s less honed than your usual kung fu bout; plus, as director Gordon Chan explains in the commentary, his apparent competency is how all kids fight in Hong Kong, because they’ve copied it from the movies!
Talking of the action — it’s an 18? I know the BBFC used to be harsher, and particularly so on things featuring martial arts and whatnot, but I still don’t see how this makes an 18. A bit of swearing, a bit of blood — it’s a 15 surely? I watched this just days after 
As with any film heavily based in the realm of technology, certain things have dated. Two things work in its favour: one, as noted, it’s not actually got much to do with technology anyway; and two, it comes from the slightly later time when home computers were more commonplace, so it’s not as bad as those ’90s tech thrillers where computers could do pretty much anything a writer dreamed up. But there’s floppy discs, flight sims with flat graphics, and Magical Hacking Software that can Destroy Everything. An opening spiel about the future of warfare being cyber-attacks doesn’t feel like its quite come to pass (yet?), but then the film doesn’t wholly build on that. The computer software they’re chasing is as MacGuffiny a MacGuffin as they come — it may as well be a bomb or a file of information for all that would change the story.
In the DVD’s special features, Chan notes that 2000 AD was an attempt to make an American-style action movie, to show there’s more to Hong Kong cinema than kung fu. Maybe that’s why it’s compromised at times — it’s an emulation of something else. It’s successful in places, but certainly not entirely. My score was awarded almost immediately after watching the film, but after looking back on it through the DVD extras I find I may have liked it a bit more. Am I being too harsh? Perhaps. But still, perhaps not.
Adapted from a cult Radio 4 series, Beyond the Pole is a British mockumentary about “the first carbon neutral, vegetarian and organic expedition ever to attempt the North Pole”, starring Stephen Mangan Off 
It’s also impressively realised. Its apparent low budget led me to assume we’d, a) see very little of the actual trip, and b) what we did see would be all inside-a-tent and green-screened. But no, it was really shot on floating sea ice off the coast of Greenland, and it makes for a highly effective polar landscape. Good work, filmmakers.
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