The plot is more intricate and subtly delivered than you’d ever guess, particularly in the way it backloads the core premise. More importantly, Drive Angry is one of the best-written B-movies I’ve maybe ever seen. There’s an absolute shitload of completely wild violence, mayhem, and perversity. Where Mandy has a chainsaw fight, Drive Angry has a scene where Cage kills six guys in a gunfight while having sex (for the record, she’s kind of into it). I don’t know how the movie came across my radar, but it’s a Rosetta Stone for everything Cage did after, especially Mandy – which, with apologies to the God Panos Cosmatos, appears to have taken some serious inspiration from both its core ideas and its relentless gonzo energy. It’s bad enough to knock a solid 30% off the film’s many joys. In 2D, at least the version on Amazon Prime looks like utter blown-out garbage. I say “should,” however, because the film is close to ruined by having been shot for 3D. It’s a borderline grindhouse masterpiece that should rank up there with Con Air and From Dusk til Dawn in the pantheon of so-joyfully-stupid-it’s-genius films. If any of this sounds right to you, you need to go watch 2011’s Drive Angry RIGHT NOW. To some extent it’s a critique of the genre, but more than Cage winking at his career choices, it feels like an affirmation: what came before led here, and I did it on purpose. Mandy is an action-fantasy revenge flick that pushes into bonkers new territory, and Pig is a poetic, metatextual examination of the entire action-revenge genre: it sets itself up as John Wick but the denouement is 100% Sideways. īut with the success of films like Mandy and now Pig, these movies begin to fit into a larger arc. I understand there’s the whole thing with his taxes, which to all available evidence has forced him over the past decade to make a string of low-budget Redbox Special schlockfests with names like Primal and Vengeance: A Love Story and A Score to Settle. ![]() Nicolas Cage is probably the most interesting living American actor (close second: Laura Dern), because he treats his gifts so lightly.
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