Using 3D like it's supposed to (shoving guns, baseball bats, skull fragments, and bloody stumps deep into the lens), this romper stomper of a genre flick is good fun from-the-get-go. It's not meant to be deep, so if you were expecting anything remotely like that, then you're a fool - it's clearly about muscle cars, guns, Nic Cage doing his badass thing, and Amber Heard in Daisy Dukes ... in 3D.
Speaking of which, even though the 3D is a bit of fun, I'm really starting to lose interest in it. It's not just the bloody glasses you have to wear, nor is it just the damned cheek of charging a considerable slab more on your ticket for 3D, but it's just how damn-near-pointless 3D is. If a movie is shit, it's shit, be it in 3D or not, and vice versa. 3D isn't necessary to tell a story either, far from it, so it becomes either unimportant or a gimmick - and neither path is going to mean it properly taking off.
Moving on though, Drive Angry 3D was - at times - a little disappointing. William Fichtner's "The Accountant" is a thoroughly entertaining baddie, but there needed to be more of him throughout, meanwhile all the Satanic Cult stuff wasn't as developed (and therefore not as interesting) as it could have been, so that all became a case of generic bad guy cannon fodder for the third act. What does work are the exploitation elements - the cars, the sex, the violence, and the black humour.
Compared to Lussier & Farmer's previous 3D outing (the underwhelming remake of My Bloody Valentine, also in 3D and also featuring genre icon Tom Atkins), this is a decided step up in all respects ... it's just a shame that the pacing and plotting faltered throughout, and that some of the dialogue seemed lazy ("I'm going to kill you" - intentionally ironic in its simplicity or not, such lines came off as damp squibs when the audience was all expecting a much more creative kiss-off).
The flick would at times have a real sense of purpose propelling it forward, but then it would inexplicably lose it from time-to-time throughout (times when I'd be waiting for Fichtner's scene-stealing Accountant to turn up). Indeed, the aforementioned Satanic Cult was the most undercooked element of the script, lead by a one-note bad guy, who was entirely trumped by, yep, Fichtner's grin-inducing Accountant-from-Hell.
So it's a mixed bag, but ultimately it gets a thumbs up from me because - several scripting and pacing faults aside - it's just a bloody good time. It is called Drive Angry after all, and features sexy cars, sexy chicks, badass dudes and pounding jolts of violence ... in full-on gimmick-driven 3D.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. [click for more]
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Originally Posted by Neil
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