The whole is far less than the sum of its parts in Drive Angry, Patrick Lussier’s belligerent attempt at a disreputable B-movie. With tawdry violence as its primary goal, Lussier’s film goes overboard with sleazy cheese, from crazed carnage and gratuitous T&A – both of which peak during a sequence in which Nic Cage guns down a horde of men while a naked waitress is attached to his crotch and a bottle of Jack Daniels is gripped by his non-shooting hand – to 3D effects that revel in their flying-at-the-screen gimmickry. Cage is Milton, a literal bat-out-of-hell intent on stopping his granddaughter from being the human sacrifice in cult leader Jonah King’s (Billy Burke) ceremony to bring Hades to Louisiana, a quest aided by feisty beauty Piper (Amber Heard) and her ’69 Dodge Charger, and frustrated by the efforts of Satan’s Accountant (William Fichtner) to bring Milton back down below. With its every shot, Drive Angry winks at its audience, and yet despite the knowing bad-taste ludicrousness of the proceedings, there’s almost no humor or eroticism to the action. Completely at home overacting amidst this tidal wave of CG nastiness and tough-guy posturing, a blond-locked Cage seems to be having a grand time, and Heard is certainly attractive enough for her sexpot role. But Lussier (working from a script co-written with Todd Farmer) sells sex and violence with such tongue-in-cheek extremeness that the overall effect is of a rather straightforward supernatural-heroism tale straining oh-so-very-hard to be indecent.
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