SUMMER OF SATAN: Drive Angry

In which John Milton (1608 – 1674) loses his sight, wrestles with the big questions of humanity’s relationship to the divine and writes an epic poem that begins with man’s first disobedience and –

No, wait. Let me start over.

‘Drive Angry’. In which John Milton (Nicolas Cage) breaks out of hell in shriek of burning rubber and a cloud of petrol fumes, busts back through into the world of the living, and goes in vengeful pursuit of the Satanists who murdered his daughter and are intent on sacrificing his infant grandchild.

‘Paradise Lost’ – the whopping free-verse poem about good, evil and everything inbetween – has about as much connection with the aesthetic of ‘Drive Angry’ as ‘The Canterbury Tales’ does with ‘Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS’. That Cage’s character is called John Milton is best dismissed as the film’s unfunniest joke and all thoughts of epochal works of literature put to one side.

‘Drive Angry’, directed by Patrick Lussier, is a ribald throwback to 70s exploitation. It mixes the backwoods Satanism of ‘The Brotherhood of Satan’ and ‘Race with the Devil’ (in a nod to Jack Starrett’s film, the devil-worshippers’ preferred mode of transport is an RV) with the tyre-squealing car-porn of ‘Vanishing Point’, ‘Two Lane Blacktop’, et al. And it throws in a cluster of giddily OTT and luridly executed set-pieces, the likes of which make ‘Machete’ look like an exercise in mumblecore.

How OTT? Well, there’s the scene where Milton and The Accountant (William Fichtner) – a man deeply unappreciative of the negative impact Milton’s absconding from Hades has had on the figures – race each other across a bridge probably half the length of a football pitch. The sequence is so protracted, with exchanges of dialogue, exchanges of shots and characters swapping while they reload a variety of weapons, that before it’s half done you start wondering when exactly the bridge was extended – it suddenly seems to be a couple of miles long.

How lurid? Weeeeeell, take your pick from these two: Milton’s shagfest with a cocktail waitress interrupted by gunmen, whom he clinically despatches whilst still, ahem, maintaining his rhythm; or waffle waitress Piper (Amber Heard) quitting her job, returning home unexpectedly early, discovering her lowlife boyfriend in flagrante with another woman, and dragging said homewrecker naked out onto the lawn and putting her down with a couple of roundhouse punches thrown like a pro.

Yup, ‘Drive Angry’ gives you naked women, casually ridiculous violence (be it hand-to-hand, gunplay or the improper use of handtools), fast cars and Nic Cage not giving a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut that he’s pissed off the Prince of Darkness (“What’s he gonna do,” Milton sneers at one point, “not let me back in?”)

Cage isn’t quite as deliriously back on form as in ‘Kick-Ass’ or, definitively, ‘Bad Lieutenant, Port of Call: New Orleans’, but he’s still a lot more plugged in and giving it some than we’ve come to expect. Heard – playing the acid-tongued tough chick who finds herself along for the ride – is a blast: sexy, sassy, ass-kicking and attitudinous, the kind of gal whose pint you definitely wouldn’t spill. She’s more than just a foil for Milton; she gives the film a frisson that kicks it up a gear, pushing it beyond its obvious T&A/cars/guns laddishness.

Just as good – almost miraculously conjuring an inspired piece of characterization – is Fichtner. The idea of Nic Cage (whose income tax blues were being slaveringly reported on while ‘Drive Angry’ was in production) being pursued by an implacable suit-wearing nemesis called The Accountant is a concept so meta it could have overbalanced the film: a one-note snidey joke on which large amounts of the narrative are predicated. Thank God, then, for Fichtner, who turns the character into a slightly prissy but stop-at-nothing antagonist. The only way I can describe it is as if Dirk Bogarde had played the T-1000.

‘Drive Angry’ is a filmic slab of Marmite – you’ll love it or hate it, and be hard pressed to find an indifferent review. Me, I laughed like hell for the 100-minute running time, developed a new-found appreciation of Amber Heard and bumped up William Fichtner a fair few places on my cool list.

Race with the devil? Donut with the bad dude, more like.

Knowing

NOTE: proliferation of SPOILERS in this review.

With ‘Dark City’, ‘The Crow’ and (to a lesser degree) ‘I, Robot’, Alex Proyas demonstrated a noirish sensibility with a touch of the gothic. These films are dystopias, characterized by an appropriately brooding atmosphere. ‘Dark City’ and ‘The Crow’ demonstrate the kind of visuals that Fritz Lang, Bob Kane and Hieronymus Bosch would all be proud of. Even the toned-down mainstream approach of ‘I, Robot’ delivered more inherent threat and sense of dread at the (inevitable?) dangers of advanced technology than is the norm for a Will Smith vehicle.

Alex Proyas has a dark vision of the future. Which, theoretically at least, would make him the ideal director for a film about the end of the world.

The first problem is that it’s a contemporarily set film about the end of the world. For all that the desaturated palette of Simon Duggan’s cinematography throws an autumnal hue across every frame, like someone draping dustcovers over the furniture in a summer house at the end of the season, there are none of the darkly iconic images from elsewhere in Proyas’s filmography.

Nor does he coax the same quality of performance from star Nicolas Cage that he got from Rufus Sewell ‘Dark City’, Brandon Lee in ‘The Crow’ or Will Smith in ‘I, Robot’. This is the pre-‘Kick-Ass’, pre-‘Bad Lieutenant’ Cage, mercifully not as comatose as in the execrable ‘Next’ or as bug-eyed hammy as in ‘Ghost Rider’ or the (possibly even more) execrable ‘Wicker Man’ remake. But an autopilot, going-through-the-motions Nic Cage all the same.

The main problem, though, is … well, let’s do the synopsis thing and all should become clear.

1959: the pupils of a newly opened school bury a time capsule, the kids all contributing a picture of what they think the future will look like. All except Lucinda (Lara Robinson), who covers her sheet of paper with numbers. Her teacher collects the paper from her before she can write the last few digits. She disappears during the ceremony in which the capsule is buried in front of the school and is later found hidden in a janitor’s closet, driven almost to hysterics by the whispering “voices” who told her the pattern of numbers, her fingers bloody from scratching the final sequence into the wood of the closet door.

Fifty years later: MIT professor John Koestler (Cage) is immersing himself in his work and trying to comfort his young son Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) in the aftermath of his wife’s death. Caleb attends a ceremony at school where the time capsule is retrieved and opened. The kids are all given one of the drawings. Caleb gets Lucinda’s page of numbers. By chance, John recognises the date and number of casualties from the 9/11 attacks in the number string and obsessively starts analyzing the sequence. He comes up with the dates and death tolls for every major disaster, catastrophe or act of terrorism for the last fifty years. As well as three more dates just a few days into the future. A colleague points out that there are seemingly random strings of numbers between these date/death toll groupings and suggests, quite reasonably, that John has gone a tad loco as a result of his bereavement. Then John witnesses the next event and realizes that the unaccounted for numbers are co-ordinates. He can now predict where the last few events will take place. But will he be able to prevent them? And what’s the significance of the last few digits that Lucinda didn’t have time to add to the list?

Right then. So far we’ve got numerology, a code and a correlation to cataclysmic events. All good, dramatic stuff. And damn sight better than ‘The Da Vinci Crud’. However, ‘Knowing’ edges into uneasy territory with its choice of 9/11 as the key to John’s deciphering of the code. In a narratively effective but aesthetically questionable montage, John searches the net for archive news reports of various real-life tragedies, including the Oklahoma bombings and Lockerbie. With Lockerbie recently back in the news in the UK due to the continuing controversy over the decision to release Abdelbaset al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds (my opinion: the bastard should have died in jail – a Scottish jail – not be swanning around in a specially built villa back in Libya eighteen months after he supposedly only had three months to live), the inclusion of that reference in ‘Knowing’ threw me out of the film – much as I imagine the several 9/11 references did for American audiences – and it took me a while to reintegrate with it; to remind myself that I was watching a work of fiction.

But even this is surmountable. Proyas has already established a debate between determinism and randomness; the stage is set for an enquiry into whether John is genuinely on to something or channeling his grief into apophenia. Unfortunately, this isn’t where the filmmakers go with the material.

A subplot regarding John’s estrangement from his father – a pastor – underpins the proceedings with a theological element which gradually threatens to overwhelm the film. Once the enigma of the number sequence has solved (and its narrative potential therefore exhausted), things get a little less scientific, a little less logical – hell, a whole fuckload less! – and the three credited scripters start relying a little too desperately on shabby devices such as a kid colouring in the sun in a print of Matthaus Merian’s engraving of the chariot from ‘Ezekiel’ triggering John to a hitherto unseeded expository ejaculation along the lines of “Oh my God, yes, that paper I published recently about solar flares, I remember now, increased activity in the Kappa Beta Delta quadrant, let me immediately dash over to talk to my buddy who works at one of those fuck-off big telescopes in the middle of nowhere so that he can run a programme everyone in the astrological discipline has conveniently overlooked until I turned up to point it out … oh my God, yes, a massive solar flare is going to cause the end of the world!!!!!”

This alone would be enough to question whether or not the choo-choo train of a movie’s intellectual cachet hadn’t experience a wheels/rail detachment scenario, but ‘Knowing’ ain’t done yet. Oh no, we’ve now got Lucinda’s granddaughter, annoyingly played by the same actress. Not annoying in terms of the performance – Lara Robinson is one of those rare child actors who manages to be as cute as a button without being puke-inducingly cutesy – but because this casting decision inherently hints a reincarnation theme which is otherwise unexplored, and just causes confusion when we get to the quasi-religious, cod-philosophical, wannabe-‘Close Encounters’ finale.

Ah, the finale. This is the true sticking point of the film. Now, I’m not saying that filmmakers shouldn’t mix things up, prompt the audience to think for themselves by wrongfooting them occasionally, or strive for a different perspective on established tropes. But, if you’re going to do these things, you should at least be pretty secure in your own mind (a) what you want to achieve, (b) how you intend to achieve it, and (c) that you play fair by your own rules in doing so. Christopher Nolan is a grand master at this: as big a suspension of disbelief as ‘The Prestige’ or ‘Inception’ require, as tricksy as the structures of ‘Memento’ or ‘The Prestige’ are, Nolan is absolutely lucid about what he wants to achieve, utterly focused in the realization of it, and plays scrupulously fair.

‘Knowing’ starts out as an enigmatic puzzle based on numerology, develops into a race-against-time thriller once the message is decoded, takes a theological detour to get all Revelations on our ass … then throws aliens into the mix. Fucking aliens! It’s like watching ‘Pi’ only for it to morph into ‘Winter Light’ before going breaking out the Spielbergian god-lights and cloying sentimentality. Oh, and with Jerry Bruckheimer, Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay invited to the “let’s blow up a fuckton of stuff” end of the world party.

Not that any of those dudes would have the class to end the world to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, so kudos to Proyas for that at least.

But let’s get back to the aliens thing for a minute. And I’ll try to make it quick. I’ve exhausted almost 1,400 words so far on ‘Knowing’ – 1,400 words on an essentially flawed movie that I’ll probably never reapproach – and I have other things to do. Such as drink beer. Read the new Iain M. Banks. Watch other movies.

The alien thing starts with some emotionless types in anonymous black vehicles surveilling John’s house. They’re tall, blonde, chiselled faces, long black coats. In a war movie, these boys’d have the Gestapo audition in the bag. You spend a while wondering if they’re from some sinister government agency.

Late in the game, they’re revealed to be aliens. When they shuck off their human guises, they present as silvery, shiny humanoid types. When they turn away from John to lead his son and Lucinda’s granddaughter into the pod that will carry them up into a mothership that looks like an icicle on steroids, a translucence wavers around their shoulderblades; a transulence that shimmers and almost imperceptibly weaves itself into the suggestion of wings.

And there we have the essential flaw of ‘Knowing’. It morphs through its various stages/subgenres/narrative touchstones to reconcile finally with the deus ex machina of Aryan alien angels picking up two kids from the whole of humankind and dropping them off on an otherwise uninhabited planet to “start over”. And – astoundingly – it gets even worse in the very last shot (the coda to the Beethoven’s 7th/humanity-buys-the-farm set-piece). The planet these poor kids are dumped on (without a whisper of instruction or any supplies courtesy of their extraterrestrial alleged benefactors) is full of something that looks like cornfields made of polyps, with a fucking big hey-look-at-me-I’m-a-garden-of-Eden-allegory tree in the middle of it. They’re both clutching their pet rabbits as the aliens beam them down and unceremoniously depart.

Rabbits.

As in breed like ~.

Subtle. Real subtle.

Ladies and gentleman: ‘Knowing’. A film that destroys our world but offers us the happy ending of two prepubescent kids being abandoned in the cosmos (with the expectation of sexual compatibility, self-sufficiency and the rebuilding of society by way of generations of inbreeding) by a bunch of Nazi alien angels.

Surely Erich von Daniken is owed some royalties.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: Werner Herzog / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 40 of 100

Nicolas Cage is the new Klaus Kinski.

Yes, you read that right. As Lieutenant Terence McDonagh in Werner Herzog’s magnificently unhinged crime thriller ‘The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans’, Cage gives the kind of performance that not only sends you spinning back in time a couple of decades to recall his dementedly inspired heyday in the likes of ‘Raising Arizona’, ‘Vampire’s Kiss’ and ‘Wild at Heart’, but dredges up cinematic memories of the classic, borderline insane Herzog/Kinski collaborations. Indeed, it’s easy to claim McDonagh as Aguirre with a badge and gun, Fitzcarraldo with a yen for zydeco instead of grand opera. Like Aguirre, he enters the film absolutely fucking way off base of normal and just plunges headlong into a downward spiral of his own creating from there. Like Fitzcarraldo, he has a prostitute girlfriend and an aching desire, born of genuine romanticism, to strive towards a better life for them. Only whereas Fitzcarraldo does it with a rust-bucket old boat and the help of an indian tribe, McDonagh uses a gun and the dubious association of a drug dealer.

Reading back over that last paragraph, I notice that I’ve used “magnificently unhinged”, “dementedly inspired” and “borderline insane” in one sentence. This would normally be evidence of extremely sloppy writing and I’d stop right now and do a stringent editing job. But this is Werner Herzog we’re talking about – moreover, Werner Herzog tapping into Nicolas Cage at his most uninhibited (with Cage in turn drawing from the well of lunacy that fuels his director) – and anything less than gushing, aureate, over-the-top screeds of purple prose seems somehow inappropriate. Besides, it says everything you need to know about ‘Bad Lieutenant’ that the weirdest part of the aforementioned sentence is the proximity of “crime thriller” to “Werner Herzog”.

But enough of the etymology already! What about the film? How does Herzog fare with thrilleramics? What’s with the Bavarian maverick helming a remake?

Ah yes, that’s the big question. I remember a couple of years ago when word of the project first filtered out. Cage had just racked up the unholy trinity of ‘The Wicker Man’, ‘Ghost Rider’ and ‘Next’ (the fact that fucking ‘Ghost Rider’ was the best of the bunch says it all!). Herzog was riding higher as a documentarian than a feature film director, having just released the immaculately well made but curiously un-Herzogian ‘Rescue Dawn’. The original ‘Bad Lieutenant’ was barely 15 years old and still firmly lodged in the cineaste’s consciousness courtesy of it constituting (a) the last truly great movie on Abel Ferrara’s CV and (b) the last truly great Harvey Keitel performance. There seemed no need at all for a remake.

I’ve read reviews that dismiss any comparisons between Ferrara’s film and Herzog’s as negligible. Herzog himself has stated that the ‘Bad Lieutenant’ part of the title was foisted on the film by the producer and that ‘Port of Call, New Orleans’ (a title I much prefer) is a stand-alone movie. There has also been talk that ‘Bad Lieutenant’ could function as a loosely collective title for any movie, set anywhere, which basically takes a morally compromised cop as its starting point and does its own thing from there. Maybe the much-mooted big-screen ‘Sweeney’ adaptation could benefit from the idea: ‘The Bad Detective Inspector – Port of Call, London’. Obviously, you’d need to cast Tom Hardy, reunite him with ‘Bronson’ director Nicolas Refn Winding and have him freak out whilst hallucinating Viking hoards before he knees some blagger in the face and announces “you’re nicked, tinkerbell” in order to recapture the sheer weirdness of what Cage and Herzog conjure from the material but, you know, it could work.

Ultimately, William M. Finkelstein’s script cleaves to only a couple of story beats from Ferrara’s film – the B.L. sexually coercing a young woman in return for looking the other way to a minor misdemeanour; the B.L.’s burgeoning gambling debts – but the scenes it references are so memorable it’s difficult not to entertain the earlier movie as a frame of reference. All told, it’s for the best that Herzog was in the director’s chair: with anyone else helming, the results would probably have been a weak retread. Herzog, however, makes it his own. He shoots post-Katrina New Orleans as an alien landscape. Alligators and iguanas lend POVs as essential and intriguing as those of any of the main characters. If you can imagine ‘Fata Morgana’ getting mixed up in the editing room with a James Ellroy adaptation, that should give you some idea – but only an idea, mind – of the bizarre delights of ‘Port of Call, New Orleans’.

It’s probably redundant to warn that this film isn’t for everyone. There will be plenty who approach it expecting an industry standard crime thriller and start getting seriously freaked out round about the time the iguanas come into and most likely hit the off button the moment someone’s soul starts dancing. (Yes, you read that right as well.) But Herzog’s flaunting of genre requirements is made clear pretty quickly. There’s a scene where McDonagh and his equally loose cannon partner Stevie Pruit (Val Kilmer) haul someone in and question them. You know the kind of interview room scene. You’ve seen it a million times. Enclosed room, no windows, tape recorder running if the interviewee’s lucky, rolled up phone book in the face if they’re not. This is how Herzog does it: the interview room has a window; you can see traffic passing outside; the tension generated by Pruit’s unpredictable behaviour around the suspect is drained away very quickly as McDonagh sends Pruit outside and sits down to have a fairly genial conversation with the interviewee. The dialogue ceases to matter. Ditto the plot ceases to matter. The passing of traffic outside becomes somehow mesmerising, akin to the driving sequence in Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’. The denouement dares the laughable in deconstructing what a cop thriller should be. Herzog risks howls of derision, confident as only someone of eccentric genius can be that his audience are in on the joke.

And yet in the darkest, craziest scenes of ‘Port of Call, New Orleans’, Herzog and Cage go plunging into the abyss together, all out, balls to the wall, hell bent and no safety net. The end result is as memorable as anything either of them have done; a movie as unconventional as it is entertaining. I mentioned James Ellroy earlier and I meant it. I’d bloody love to see Herzog direct ‘The Big Nowhere’ or ‘White Jazz’. With iguanas.

Kick-Ass

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: comedy / In category: 4 of 10 / Overall: 26 of 100

The brilliance of ‘Kick-Ass’: where to begin?

Do I talk about Matthew Vaughn’s diversity as a director, how he makes it three in a row after ‘Layer Cake’ (one of the few bona fide standouts in the slew of post-‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ Brit-crime movies) and ‘Stardust’ (an exuberant take on Neil Gaiman’s novel boasting Robert de Niro’s best turn in ages as a cross-dressing sky pirate)?

Do I talk about the cluster of terrific supporting performances, including Mark Strong, Dexter Fletcher and Robert Flemyng (who are rapdly shaping up as the Matthew Vaughn Regulars), as well as featuring a hallelujah-praise-the-lord-he’s-back-on-form Nicolas Cage?

Do I talk about how the film simultaneously celebrates and satirises the comic-book superhero genre, effortlessly walking a high wire between funny-as-fuck set-pieces and darker, more brutal moments?

Or do I just mention Hit-Girl?

As played by Chloe Moretz (twelve at the time of shooting), Hit-Girl is American cinema’s newest icon. Simple as that. The movie might be called ‘Kick-Ass’, after the alter ego of high school nobody and wannabe hero Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson), but it’s Hit-Girl’s show all the way. And how could it not be? When you’ve got a twelve year-old assassin who casually drops the C-word before launching into some John Woo-style balletic action and taking down a room full of bad guys, it’s kind of hard to top.

Which isn’t to denigrate Johnson’s portrayal of Dave/Kick-Ass. Channelling nerdish delusion, heroic stupidity and hangdog melancholy in roughly equal measure, the only reason he never quite defines the movie is the sheer weight of expectation. Like I said, the very title is ‘Kick-Ass’, and yet the character – deliberately so – is reactive rather than proactive. Kick-Ass desperately wants to be pro-active; wants to be a superhero; wants to stop crime and win the girl and make the world a better place. It’s when he finds himself entangled with the considerably more disciplined, experienced and unflinchingly hardcore team of Big Daddy and Hit-Girl that (a) the reality of his ineffectiveness comes home to him; and (b) he inadvertently exacerbates an already hyper-tense situation.

The precise mechanics of the plot require little discussion. Narratively, ‘Kick-Ass’ doesn’t break any new ground or pull off any surprises. The late-in-the-game introduction of Christopher Mintz-Plasse’s strutting, show-offy Red Mist pans out so predictably you can almost chart it on a graph, peaking with the glaringly obvious and sequel-baiting last frame.

I’m noticing a trend on the internet to negative reviews of ‘Kick-Ass’, the most commonly cited criticism being that it never gets as down and dirty and subversive as the graphic novel its based on. In particular, the mainstream reviewers’ assertion that Vaughn’s film is a faithful adaptation of said source material has come in for a specific hammering, with many bloggers pointing up the differences. From what I understand, though, graphic novel and film were being developed in tandem – akin to Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘2001: A Space Odyseey’ and Stanley Kubrick’s film version – and therefore both versions diverge in some places and demonstrated complete fidelity in others. Ultimately, again like Clarke and Kubrick’s sci-fi opus, Matthew Vaughn’s film and Mark Millar’s comic book are two takes on a shared vision; they differ, but complement each other.