Drive Angry

Drive Angry resides in the No Man's Land between ignorant bliss and smug self-awareness, noxious tar pit that slowly sucks down fun premises into a black morass of lazy winking and absolving self-deprecation. However, it is also the first film in a while to successfully navigate its way back and forth through this trap-filled territory. Drive Angry certainly does not work as a subversive take on grindhouse in the vein of Tarantino's Death Proof; it is not even great trash. But it's damn fun, and as soon as I finished watching it the first time I admit I immediately planned a second trip to the theater.

Having managed to avoid nearly everything regarding the film save for its absurd title, I got to experience Drive Angry's slow mounting of story elements with a degree of unknown I never enjoy anymore, not in the age of total media saturation. The opening scene of the film depicts a CGI prison in a red-coated frame. For a second, I did not even recognize it as hell, though the presence of a muscle car tearing out of the place on a bridge also threw me off the trail. I don't recall Virgil mentioning that when he showed Dante the place.

The first 30 minutes of the film veer wildly out of control, jumping any fluid kind of editing with haphazard introductions for the movie's cast list weaving an unnecessarily ornate web for only a handful of characters. I saw the film two times and was still bewildered at the lack of context for the opening barrage of images, from Nicolas Cage chasing down some rednecks with pentagrams marked on their chests to a supremely tarted-up Amber Heard crushing the testicles of her lascivious, greasy diner boss. And just when you've settled down and accepted the absurdity of the situation, along comes William Fichtner in a suit calling himself the "Accountant," always asking if Cage has just come through the area knowing full-well the answer. Those left alive by the stranger's tears through town ask the Accountant who he is and what the man has done, but he deftly avoids any exposition.

By the time pieces start to fall in place and the character name John Milton drops a huge clue for those of us who remember senior-year English, Drive Angry has amassed such an impressive horde of contrivances, loose ends and overall questions about the physical properties of certain items and people that the whole shebang nearly collapses. Then, it acts as if nothing ever happened and finally gets down to the good stuff: blatant, unabashed fetishism of every body part and overcompensating gadget.

Drive Angry knows how dumb it is and occasionally shows its hand to the audience to let us in on its cheek, but the sincere, shameless ogling pervading the film makes for a far funnier and more entertaining ride than the occasional plodding moments of overt self-awareness. Cage, toned down from his most manic work, looks increasingly withdrawn in his roles, as if the weight of his recent manic episodes on-screen, be they good (Bad Lieutenant) or bad (almost all the rest). His rage here is amusingly insular given the wild insanity of his actions, a slow burn of resentment and self-loathing that grounds the film's nonsense in the sort of dramatic seriousness that only makes a film like this funnier. Then again, these days it is not always clear whether or not the self-loathing in a Cage character reflects its actor's own feelings.

However, he looks as if he had fun here, delivering his lines with a halting relish as if he wanted to savor every last morsel of such delicious lines as, "I never disrobe before a gunfight." Milton's story unfolds so ponderously that Cage's seriousness pales in comparison to the pseudo-pathos of his character, but Cage comes out of his gloom with enough dry humor to make the convoluted issue of his daughter being murdered by Satanists (led by a Chris Gaines/Garth Brooks-lookin' Cajun Jim Jones played by Billy Burke) and his granddaughter abducted for sacrifice not as cumbersome as the pile-on of narrative could be. Heard has scant to do save shout terrified or angry responses to Milton's dour carnage, and she does not appear to have put up a fight against the too-loving gaze of the camera, which always finds the time to scan over her rear and zoom in on her eye-shadowed face. It's harder to read what she thinks of her role, as she commits to the half-tough, half-damsel Piper but occasionally gives a glance that suggests she went back to her trailer to chew out her agent.

Even if she had a blast, though, she and Cage combined could not equal the unrelenting glee with which Fichtner, a super-solid character actor, plays his role. Delighting in the mysterious yet inevitable nature of his character's origins and purpose, Fichtner ignores everyone sharing the screen with him, walking around side characters asking the Accountant's repeated questions as he consumes every piece of scenery not nailed down, casually munching cud as the characters' bewilderment perhaps reflects the actors' own. Fichtner is one of my favorite "that guys," and to see him get to let loose in a role that does not so much take advantage of his skills as let the more subtle actor get his chance to mug shamelessly. If Cage hilariously meditates on his lines, Fichtner does not need to think before spewing out some ingenious, unmistakably sinister yet delightfully bizarre threat or insult. As a villain, he is not particularly frightening, but he does not want to be. The Accountant chases down his escaped quarry not out of a need for vengeance nor even a sense of duty (though he does need to "balance the numbers"): he's just having fun playing with Milton.

I would file Drive Angry under "guilty pleasure" but it does something I've been begging dumb movies to do for some time now: it never undercuts its thick-headedness with too many winks, never tries to forgive its exposition (and my GOD is the exposition in this movie ridiculous). Because it does not attempt to pass off its bad moments as knowing jokes, they actually work as comedy, and when the actual madness kicks in, Drive Angry has inventiveness to spare. A shootout featuring Milton still inside a bar waitress is one of the most outlandish sequences in years, and the use of slow-motion for the entire sequence is cleverer than anything in a Zack Snyder movie. I continue to prefer 3D in films that use it for the kitsch gimmick it is, and the flying limbs and slow-motion bullets flying at the audience make for as good a time as the schlock of Piranha 3D. I expected to go into this film to feed my ironic love affair with the bad Nic Cage (I have a completely sincere adoration for the man when he's on his game), and instead I got a perfectly delightful bit of screwball amorality. But I have a soft-spoken for chicken-fried crap; I am, after all, from the South. Also, can we get a buddy cop film starring Nic Cage and Bill Fichtner, please?

John Adams

Near the end of Kirk Ellis' gloriously researched miniseries concerning our second president, John Adams, now retired and visiting the White House to see his son John Quincy assume the presidency, is shown John Trumbull's painting Declaration of Independence and immediately launches into a rant. The entire Continental Congress was never present at any one time, he rages. A taken-aback Trumbull stammers, "Y-you would not deny the artist a certain... license?" Adams retorts that the Europeans say that nothing is as false as modern history, then bitterly adds, "I consider the true history of the American Revolution as lost forever."

That is what Ellis' script, based on David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, seeks to rectify. Though it naturally takes artistic license of its own, even within the scene just described -- the only comment he was recorded making was an offhand, nostalgic remembrance of nominating Washington to lead the Continental Army -- it offers a side of the Revolution rarely seen and, in the process, sheds light on a tragically forgotten Founding Father.


And how anyone could overlook such a fascinating life for so long is baffling. Ellis wisely begins this biopic not with Adams' childhood but on the brink of the Revolution. Adams (Paul Giamatti), a respected but otherwise inconspicuous lawyer, suddenly finds himself thrust into the spotlight when he reluctantly agrees to represent the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre when no one else will plea their case. When his wife, Abigail (Laura Linney), protests, he stands by his principles that everyone deserves a fair trail. As the courtroom rages with incensed colonials, Adams attacks their passion with reason and forces them (chiefly the jury) to recognize that the colonials were as much to blame for the confusion and terror as the soldiers. He manages to get the men off and returns home, where he and his wife celebrate what they assume will be his final case before the public shuns him forever.

His surprise matched my own when Thomas Jefferson then comes to town and offers him a position in the First Continental Congress. Jefferson, a life-long friend of the family, understands that Adams' principles and conviction are needed to inspire the bickering, selfish representatives. Jefferson had no idea what he was getting himself into. The miniseries kicks into high gear over the next three episodes, with Adams displaying all of his passion as well as his stubbornness and a frankness totally unsuited for the political world. He irritates the Congress so much that they ship him abroad to negotiate with France, which only makes matters as now he not only seems insolent and uncultivated but cannot even properly communicate with in their native tongues.

Throughout all of it, each set is so meticulously constructed and its characters so real that you forget you're watching a costume piece. The boisterous Congressional meetings reflect the representatives' constant fear that the British will blast down their door and kill them all at any minute, while Adams' ride across the Atlantic is fraught with peril from the British blockade. The French scenes in particular are superb, as the puritanical, faithful Adams steps off the boat into the death throes of European decadence. These diseased, flighty aristocrats blanket their faces in powder and every line they utter has a lascivious edge to it. They regard Adams and fellow ambassador Ben Franklin (Tom Wilkinson) as wondrous curiosities, so lost in their syphilitic spiral that they utterly fail to recognize just what ideals Adams and Franklin bring with them.


Wilkinson is the first of many casting coups that make John Adams such a rich experience. He revels in the depravity, and he's remarkably spry from a septuagenarian; when he gets Congress to axe Adams as French ambassador, you get the distinct impression that it's less to do with Adams' lack of diplomatic polish and more simply because this uptight firebrand is harshing his cool. Danny Huston appears in the first few chapters as Sam Adams, who makes his passionate cousin look meek in comparison. Stephen Dillane's Jefferson is wracked with grief but always showing resolve; the series never dips into his seedier side save for a shot of the slave Sally weeping on his deathbed, but we can understand what drove him to an affair when you see how his wife's death affected him.

But it's David Morse who steals the entire series as George Washington. Appearing only fleetingly throughout the first five episodes, he conveys Washington's quiet authority immediately with a rigid military posture and a deep voice that never rises above a stern whisper, forcing others to calm down and pay attention to hear him. If Hollywood ever does yet another project concerning Washington, I hope Morse is the first person they call.

For their part, Giamatti and Linney offer up powerhouse performances. Abigail Adams is every bit as interesting as her husband -- never formally educated, she could nevertheless hold reasonable discourse with the finest minds of the day, and Adams valued her counsel above all else -- and by all accounts the two were not simply man and wife but best friends. McCullough culled much of his research from the treasure trove of correspondence between the two, and John almost always addresses her as his friend rather than wife. Giamatti balances John's mocked and maligned public persona with this gentle personal side beautifully, and you will believe that Linney can do anything a man can do in a world that was still completely opposed to gender equality.


After Adams attains the presidency, the series winds down to a softer close; his term is fraught with slander as he remains neutral while the Congress splinters into two parties, who both turn on him, eventually moving him to pass the controversial Alien and Sedition Laws. He retires with quiet dignity and suffers the sorrows of the age when he loses children to alcoholism and cancer and even must bear the pain of losing his dearest friend. After reconciling with Jefferson, the two jovially correspond until they both famously die on the same day, the 50th anniversary of the nation's independence, no less. It may seem anticlimactic to end on such a quiet note, but that's the beauty of John Adams: where all other accounts of the Revolution and the establishment of our country take place on the battlefield, this depicts the real front lines: the town hall meetings and diplomatic missions, in which philosophy shaped a nation and people like Adams had to kowtow to European leaders for the capital to make it a reality.

This series does have one major flaw, however, and that is in the frantic direction of Tom Hooper. For a miniseries about a relatively plain man who accomplishes extraordinary things with words, not action, the camera moves at a breakneck pace, with handheld tracking shots even when people aren't moving. In the courtroom scene of the first episode, the camera darts around Adams and the jury, abruptly cutting at time to begin again, presumably because the first cameraman tripped and fell down. Mercifully, Hooper takes some downers when we get into the later episodes and puts the camera on a dolly and, saints preserve us, just sets it down and doesn't move it. His direction distracts from an otherwise perfect project.

Nevertheless, John Adams remains one of the greatest miniseries ever made, perhaps the best since Band of Brothers. While HBO's other big 2008 project, Generation Kill, is a better crafted work, it lacks the expansive yet intimate feel of this series. It turns an overlooked, maligned figure into perhaps the most interesting and vital of the Founding Fathers, fascinating in both his professional and private lives. It has a political relevance that is perhaps to transparent, but Adams' belief that war must always be the last resort when diplomacy fails obviously calls to mind the Iraq war, but Adams genuinely believed it. Its dodgy, incongruous direction aside, this seamless period recreation and slew of award-worthy performances is one of the few costume dramas compelling enough to make history truly come alive in ways beyond simply dressing people up for a few hours.