Max Vengeance per Gallon: DRIVE ANGRY, THE GREEN HORNET (in 2-D)

Two titles made it to Netflix in time for the heat: DRIVE ANGRY and THE GREEN HORNET (both 2011). Saw them and now can't remember the difference, but I remember the cars. America!!

ANGRY especially seems to labor under the impression that if it filters in enough Sons of Anarchy auto-erotic Americana --churches, flags, barbecues, Satanism, gasoline, redneck bars, trailers, diners, engine failures, and trigger-happy Arizona cops -- and of course cars, cars, cars, we'll forgive it its lack of any legit trespasses. It dresses awfully badass for a film afraid to drive even a hair outside the pre-established yellow lines of the "vehicular Satanist" genre. Even old Nic Cage is more or less on cruise control, unwilling to floor it with any of his signature hammy over-emoting. Outside of speeding and shooting some cops (who shot at him first, yo! Stay in school) he may as well be a Sunday school teacher.

Both ANGRY and HORNET  think they can get away with having opening scenes where a cool character is walking in slow motion towards the camera as some car or building slowly explodes behind him, like it's not been done to death, buried in an avalanche of parody, dug up, satirized, buried again, re-exhumed with reverse firing rockets after being buried alive by bulldozers hired by the guy who won the Oscar for INGLORIOUS BASTERDS (Scheisse! Habe Ich seine nahmen so bald vergessen?)

DRIVE finds Cage--once again back from the grave to avenge his daughter's death and/or save his granddaughter after rotting in Hell. Apparently Hell consists of watching helplessly from beyond the veil as your loved ones suffer. If the veil in this case was the screen and we were his loved ones, well, there you are, all meta and--unless you're at a drive-in or 3-D ready--choking on the exhaust fumes of cynical producers and product placement.

A pretty boy from the WB casting couch (Billy Burke) is the swaggering evangelical Satanist cult leader who's holding onto Cage's granddaughter until the moon is right for the solstice sacrifice which will herald doomsday. William Fichtner is 'the accountant' who's followed Cage up from Hell to get him to come back home or at least call Satan and let him know when he intends coming home. We learn that Satan disproves of all the idiots sacrificing people in his name, which is awesome! Dude, Satan says enough with the baby killings! David Icke would disagree, but I approve this message.

There are some plusses to DRIVE ANGRY, such as the lack of alcohol abuse: in one scene Cage is shooting bad guys while having sex with a naked waitress (he of course remains fully clothed, with sunglasses (that's not the plus part) and holding a bottle of whiskey. He shoots the guys without spilling a drop and even takes a slow mo swig between bullets. Now that's a good plus! The copious humiliated naked women parts however taint the film with that new leather misogynistic smell. Amber Heard, Nic's gal Friday has a lot of moxy and fighting skillz, but does that really make up for her objectification? She all but grinds herself on the hood like she's the dorm room poster of a frat pledge. And don't skanky waitresses have mothers, too? Where's the mom of that abused prostitute roaring back from the grave to punch old Nic?

Hell, by the way, is depicted here as a kind of hustler's paradise, like Phoenix, AZ (where my brother Fred lives) but tinted red and with more ash. I don't know much about the autos in DRIVE ANGRY, that's Fred's department. But I do know one thing, they're not stupid SUVs, and that's good enough for me. My first car was a 1976 Ford Maverick, which I could get up to 90 mph to jump this hill near my house and get massive air. It wasn't much at the time, but now looking back that thing was the shit!

Mine was tan, but you get the point

In DRIVE I do like that Heard is such a mega-badass and not afraid to really sink her teeth into the flesh of the guys she fights. But the whole thing with rescuing a baby from Satanists, that just doesn't work. Who can get worked up about the welfare of a baby? With this error the film draws unfortunate comparison to  another all-action film with a baby mcguffin, SHOOT 'EM UP. Fellas, no one cares if you threaten to kill a baby, unless your name is Wes Craven and your budget is three dollars. When the budget's over a million and the target demo is 16 year-old boy, there's no emotional investment in a bunch of swaddling clothes - the kid may be cute, but he's not a character. He can't act. She can't act, excuse me. And if anything happened to that kid we would have heard about it from some concerned Christian group long before this.

GREEN HORNET is marginally more engaging, though Seth Rogen (who co-wrote) proves here that when shove comes to shovel he can  bromance crotch gags but he can't make us love again. And while director Jean Michel Gondry has made us love again--in the past--he doesn't do it here. More personal anecdotes: I was a huge Green Hornet fan beginning around 1981 after my mom bought me an old radio show LP (left) to help me recover from getting my wisdom teeth out. Nothing like oral pain and opiates to make a 14 year old kid open to new ideas. I learned how to do an Irish accent based on Britt Reid's faithful chief reporter Axeford (played by Edward James Olmos for some reason in this new version). I still use some of Axeford's expressions in my everyday speech, such as "Sure'n it must be tha hornet!" So yeah, I know a little about the Hornet. And that makes me dangerous.

Much as I revere some of Jean Michel Gondry's previous films I can only imagine how much more awesome HORNET would be with Jody Hill directing. The unsung genius behind the genuinely anarchic OBSERVE AND REPORT (see 'A Travis for Our Times') would have found the right note, and the music would have been 15x as awesome! As it is, HORNET's music choices are too keyed in to demographic market research to not whiff of cross-promotion. At least they avoid the 'word association' game. I kept waiting for some emo cover of Joni Mitchell's "Just a little Green" or Kermit's "It's Not Easy Being Green", or maybe "Green Onions" or Hold Steady's "Hornets! Hornets!"

To its credit, HORNET plays with issues of class, sexism, race, and entitlement - stuff that also reveals its director's a socialist (or French, or both). Shouldn't Kato be pissed that he's smarter, more talented and tougher than his boss? Of course he should! But Gondry illuminates class resentment in a country that denies class exists; ge brings up issues we in our American stupor have elephant in the roomed right out of our vision. How dare he parade the hired help through our escapism like we're married to Liz Taylor down at Big Riata?  As Kato, Jay Chou looks good in turtlenecks and underplays brilliantly, but his martial arts skill is semi-buried under a ton of TERMINATOR DARK KNIGHT-style digital 'POV weapon-scanning' that's just not needed. All Seth Rogen as Brit Reid has going for him is a good party bro vibe, the ability to take a punch and dish one out. A lot of prime real estate goes to waste - and the associations with rich kid cinema come wafting in from the pool like the stank of a maidless frat house.

The original Badass TV show

For all that, a lot of people put a lot of effort into both of these films - which means they deserve respect, and yet this also calls a lot of things into question. The cool part of something like the Batman TV show was how our own imaginations were required to complete the illusion. Seeing the threadbare candy-colored splendor of the show now, I realize just how much detail my childhood imagination supplied. THE GREEN HORNET by contrast is so over--produced with CGI that you don't even need to see it - it's seen itself so many times, been so tinkered-over in post-production houses that the dick jokes bounce around like polished stones pretending to be rough, un-tumbled granite. Only a robot could truly love it. 

In films like THE HORNET and DRIVE ANGRY, the fingers on the hand of genuine characterization and emotion are cut to fit the glove of ADD-addled CGI. These movies leave you nowhere but numb, and above all not-bored. Sometimes not bored is enough, but most of the time, having your ADD catered to by the cinematic equivalent of a rich kid's indulgent butler is not fun. Even something like RACE WITH THE DEVIL (1975) had enough rough edges, goofball termites, character development and semi-improvised human interaction to do something to you other that felt real. The characters DRIVE and HORNET have no such grace. Every breath is measured out by the frame.

I'll probably have forgotten these two films by the time I get 3-D TV and can see them how they're meant to be seen, and I'm glad. But, seriously? What's up with Cage and these undead avenging dad roles? I haven't seen GHOST RIDER "officially" but I feel in my gut it's the same plot. Cage seems self-typecast as an all-American semi "good ole" boy, destined to return again and again from the dead to air his turbo-charged grievance against the demon/man who killed--or is about to kill--his child, wife and/or grandchild. All I can do is cradle a stack of Cage's latest films all purchased $4 for $20 in the Blockbuster sale bin and shout "NoooooO!" while shaking my fist in slow motion at the overhead camera... then, in even slower motion, the whole chain of video rental stores blows up as I stroll boldly forth into the realm of internet streaming and 3-D. The end... of an era.

But not the end of Nic Cage! He's ready to drive up from Hell again, whenever money is needed, in whatever costume it is you ri-quar of him. If what you ri-quar is he get his 3-D ass up in them woods, maybe you're a hillbilly in DELIVERANCE, or maybe you're just industry suits afraid to step outside the cycle killer revenge genre, forcing Cage time after time to shoot, punch, and snarl as some female relative is abused in a manner sufficient to warrant his subsequent dour vindictiveness. Mess with his girl/s, he'll kill you. Mess with his car, he'll give you the horn.