Just when you thought 3D couldn’t get any more terrifying – here comes Nic Cage.
The Oscar-winning star’s bulging eyes and idiosyncratic hairline will be comin’ atcha like Cleopatra in the wonderfully-named revenge thriller,** Drive Angry**.
The title pretty much tells you all you need to know – Cage will play a vengeful father who becomes embroiled in a bloody and protracted car chase with the goons who killed his daughter and kidnapped her baby (so Cage is now playing grandfathers? God, that makes us feel old).
As the miles tick away, the bodies begin to pile up like the points on David Bentley’s licence as Cage DRIVES ANGRY.
Sounds pretty simple, and vaguely similar to Stopping Power, the ill-fated Jan de Bont/John Cusack thriller, but this seems like a deliberate throwback to the great car chase movies of the 70s and 80s; a blood-soaked Smokey & The Bandit, a gore-flecked Gone In 60 Seconds, a really** Dirty Mary Crazy Larry**.
Let’s hope director Patrick Lussier, who directed the impressive My Bloody Valentine 3D - can bring it where it counts, and sustain the tension and originality in a movie that looks like it won’t stop, even for a toilet break at Clacton services.
Lussier co-wrote the screenplay with Todd Farmer, and filming on the Nu Image/Millennium Films production is set to begin next April. Can’t wait – with this, Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans and Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass, 2010 is shaping up to be the return of Nic Cage: Wired Badass, and the banishment of Nic Cage: Guy Who Looks Like He’s Just Woken Up. And amen to that.