Secretly Awesome - Vampire's Kiss

Release Date: June 2, 1989

Director: Robert Bierman

Writer: Joseph Minion

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Jennifer Beals, Maria Conchita Alonso

Box Office: $725,131

Rotten Tomatoes: 62%

Buy It!

Whenever someone claims that Nicolas Cage is a terrible actor, I know I can name at least a half-dozen movies that person has never seen. Sure, some his recent stuff is pretty questionable, though not all of it (I'll get to some of those another time), but he has a solid bank of undeniably brilliant performances that will forever keep him far away from legitimately being labelled terrible.

Drive Angry - ***

Drive Angry is a quick redemption for Nicolas Cage from the more-horrible-than-you-can-imagine Season of the Witch, which was released about one month prior. It's all of the awful ridiculousness you hope for in a non-legitimately-great Cage film, all of the silly fun you used to get out of such an in-between Cage film, back before people associated him with pure shit, which really isn't fair, even after garbage like Bangkok Dangerous or The Wicker Man, back when his "in-betweeners" were more like National Treasure or The Rock. Pure, unabashed fun, with no point or reason for existing other than entertainment, Drive Angry has the goods.

Drive Angry is essentially what Grindhouse and Machete and anything like that released in the last few years was trying to be, except it succeeds. It features a lot of the same things as those films, hot girls, fast cars, crazy weapons and extreme violence, so why is it better? Because, unlike those films, it's not trying to be cute. It's completely sincere in its mayhem. There's no winking at the camera, the images weren't made to look grainy and scratched in post-production, and I actually get the sense that the filmmakers think what they are doing is legitimately cool, not just kitschy and ironic. It takes a particular combination of talent and lack-thereof to pull off this kind of film, and I'm sorry to say, but Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez are simply too talented to waste their time trying (though "too talented" doesn't account for Inglorious Basturds (or however the fuck it's not spelled)).

So what is Drive Angry? Well, Cage breaks out from Hell, steals the "God-killer" from Satan, which is a big gun that blasts any living thing, divine or not, into nothingness (but for reasons unknown only comes with three bullets), teams up with Amber Heard on a road-trip to track down the leader of a Satanic cult, who intends to sacrifice Cage's new-born granddaughter after raping and killing his daughter, all while being chased by the Devil's Accountant, played to brilliance by William Fichtner (watch for the greatest delivery of "Come here, fat fuck" you could ever hope to see). And it delivers on everything that description promises, which includes a fist-fight in the midst of a gunfight inside of an RV that is in the middle of a ten-minute-long car chase. Among other things. It'll certainly do until Cage's next Bad Lieutenant.

Kick-Ass - ***

I think I like the new comic-book adaptation Kick-Ass a lot more when I'm not watching it. It's a movie that grows on you. I walked out of it feeling a little disappointed, and wrote down a list of complaints like, "I didn't like the kid in the lead role," "Feels low-rent," "Disjointed." But after a second viewing and a few weeks to ponder over the experience, I don't really feel too strongly about any one of those comments, and my list of praiseworthy details has maybe doubled since opening night.

While I can't say I loved the movie, the things that I loved about it are those which I recall most easily. Aaron Johnson, the kid in the lead role, really isn't that bad. I think it's just that he is upstaged by just about everyone else in the cast, most notably by Chloe Grace-Moretz as Hit-Girl, the eleven year-old sword-wielding assassin, and Mark Strong as the mob boss and ultimate target of the film's "real-life" superheroes. Strong gives what is probably my favorite performance of the year, with the perfect blend of menace and nonchalance, like when he leaves a brutal interrogation scene and tells his henchmen to kill the guy however they wish because he wants to catch a movie with his kid. In lesser hands it would come off as grim, but Strong somehow makes it laughable. And that's really when the film is at its best, when it can transform something that should be offensive into something entertaining. Hit-Girl and her father, Big Daddy (played superbly by Nicolas Cage), share a number of these scenes, making wholesome family fun out of asking for and receiving a butterfly knife for a birthday gift.

I think the problem I have while watching the film is that not all of it is handled with the grace that these scenes are, and so sometimes it felt like it was going from one extreme to another without giving me time to adjust. At times it goes from real danger to a happy-go-lucky action sequence in the blink of an eye, and that's where it feels disjointed; it shifts its momentum too quickly for everything to register. And that's where the difficulty in adaptation lies. It's easy to pull off a change in tone in a comic series, when there are natural breaks in the narrative and each issue can have its own feel, but a film is meant to be experienced as a whole, and so a story like this can maybe seem like a little too much. But I have to say that for all of it's flaws Kick-Ass still manages to be pretty awesome.