Drive Angry (2011)

Drive Angry arrives from 2011 with a full tank of grindhouse gasoline and no interest in the culture wars that would soon consume its betters. Nicolas Cage plays John Milton, a felon who has escaped Hell by stealing Satan's personal sidearm, and who now has three days to stop a satanic cult from sacrificing his granddaughter. The premise is a car chase with theology bolted on. The film was shot in 3D, presumably so that the eyeball violence could arrive with extra dimension. It grossed $40.9 million against a $45 to $50 million budget, which tells you the audience for this sort of thing was already thinning.

Amber Heard's Piper is the closest thing here to a statement. She is a waitress who beats her cheating fiancé's mistress, then her fiancé, then joins a damned man on a mission she has no stake in, and eventually fires the Godkiller at a cult leader. She is competent, violent, and given the film's only speech about finding a worthy cause. This is not a thesis. The camera treats her the way 1970s exploitation treated women, which is to say as furniture with a pulse. A capable female lead in a film that leers at her is not a movement. It is a casting decision.

The rest of the inventory is bare. The cast is white. The politics are absent. There is no environmental sermon, no class rage, no revision of history, no lecture. The film's moral center is a man drinking beer from a cultist's skull before driving back to Hell. Roger Ebert called it an exercise in deliberate vulgarity, and he meant it as description. We concur. Grade: zero. Not because it offends, but because it has nothing to say and says it loudly.