I Demand a Remaster of Nicolas Cage's Drive Angry (2011)

How the push for 3D movies ruined a grindhouse classic

Nicolas Cage is probably the most interesting living American actor (close second: Laura Dern), because he treats his gifts so lightly. I understand there’s the whole thing with his taxes, which to all available evidence has forced him over the past decade to make a string of low-budget Redbox Special schlockfests with names like Primal and Vengeance: A Love Story and A Score to Settle.

But with the success of films like Mandy and now Pig, these movies begin to fit into a larger arc. Mandy is an action-fantasy revenge flick that pushes into bonkers new territory, and Pig is a poetic, metatextual examination of the entire action-revenge genre: it sets itself up as John Wick but the denouement is 100% Sideways. To some extent it’s a critique of the genre, but more than Cage winking at his career choices, it feels like an affirmation: what came before led here, and I did it on purpose.

If any of this sounds right to you, you need to go watch 2011’s Drive Angry RIGHT NOW. It’s a borderline grindhouse masterpiece that should rank up there with Con Air and From Dusk til Dawn in the pantheon of so-joyfully-stupid-it’s-genius films.

I say “should,” however, because the film is close to ruined by having been shot for 3D. In 2D, at least the version on Amazon Prime looks like utter blown-out garbage. It’s bad enough to knock a solid 30% off the film’s many joys.

It’s still a hell of a ride. I don’t know how the movie came across my radar, but it’s a Rosetta Stone for everything Cage did after, especially Mandy – which, with apologies to the God Panos Cosmatos, appears to have taken some serious inspiration from both its core ideas and its relentless gonzo energy. Where Mandy has a chainsaw fight, Drive Angry has a scene where Cage kills six guys in a gunfight while having sex (for the record, she’s kind of into it). There’s an absolute shitload of completely wild violence, mayhem, and perversity.

More importantly, Drive Angry is one of the best-written B-movies I’ve maybe ever seen. The plot is more intricate and subtly delivered than you’d ever guess, particularly in the way it backloads the core premise. Cage just shows up and starts plugging bad guys, and it’s not until about 2/3rds of the way in that you learn that he’s an immortal escapee from Hell out to rescue his baby grandaughter from a murderous cult. Along the way, the hints and puzzle-pieces are doled out meticulously.

The cast is also sterling, starting with Amber Heard as a tough-as-nails waitress who winds up as Cage’s driver and sidekick. One of the many uncannily smart things this dumbass movie does is avoid any romantic subtext whatsoever between Heard and Cage: I can’t think of another movie that puts two straight characters in a similar situation while making clear from the start that their agendas don’t include hooking up. It gives Heard’s character a chance to be spectacularly three-dimensional. (And boy, was she wasted in Aquaman.)

The movie also features a murderer’s row of genius character actors, including Eastbound and Down’s Katy Mixon, True Blood’s Pruitt Taylor Vince, Halloween III’s Tom Atkins, David Morse, and most of all William Fichtner, who for some reason I remember best as the shotgun-wielding, mobbed-up bank teller from the opening of The Dark Knight. His Accountant character is perfect charm-meets-menace, and becomes a vehicle for a very cool twist: suffice to say it turns out the Devil and his supposed worshipers don’t necessarily see eye to eye.

The cast is a reminder of a weird nuance here. While we’ve become used to Cage doing micro-budget indie flicks, Drive Angry was a major Hollywood production, with a budget of $50 million. According to IMDB, it even had a $3 million Superbowl commercial!

Which forces one to ask: how do you make a $50 million movie that looks like this?

See how Tom Atkins’ hair just kind of … disappears into the sky? It’s the best illustration of the movie’s Achilles Heel, which is that it’s wildly overexposed in nearly every frame. This is a blindingly bright movie, which is a problem since it’s about hell and cults and nearly-constant murder.

There are other major issues, not so much with the cinematography per se as with color and depth of field. A ton of the movie looks like it’s shot using very sloppy green screen – particularly the scenes shot in cars, which again, sort of a problem for a movie about driving. The overall effect is to make this $50 million movie full of some of the world’s best actors look like direct-to-video garbage.

It’s probably unfair, but for comparison, here’s a frame from Mandy with some similar elements. Budget: $6 million.

Now Brian Pearson, Drive Angry’s director of photography, does seem to be a hack with a filmography full of disposable dogshit. But the real culprit here was the film industry’s quest to make 3D movies A Thing back in the early 2010s.

Remember 3D movies? Remember how you had to put on those dumb glasses that made the screen look like a smear of mud? That, I’m pretty sure, is why Drive Angry is a hyperviolent action-horror movie that looks like an episode of Gilmore Girls. To be even comprehensible in 3D, it had to be shot incredibly bright.

Apparently the 3D element is why Cage got involved in Drive Angry in the first place: He was interested in exploring the possibilities of the format for him as an actor. But that artistic motivation just makes it more frustrating that 3D has ruined the movie’s post-theatrical existence.

The thing is, I’m no cinematographer, but it doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to fix Drive Angry. Hell, I’m tempted to spend a few hours ripping a DVD and throwing a mild sepia filter over the whole thing just so I can enjoy it a little more myself the next five times I watch it.

Much better, though, if the producers could put a few grand into doing it themselves and rereleasing the movie. That’s why I’m launching a petition to get Millennium Media to remaster Drive Angry.

Is this a stupid, pointless waste of my and your time? Yes. But please sign it anyway, and share it with your fellow film freaks. The timing is right: Cage has yet another crazy-quest movie coming up, Prisoners of the Ghostland, directed by Sion Sono of the awesome Suicide Club. It’s getting a lot of buzz and seems set to continue Cage’s streak of weird triumph. People will want to see one of the precursors to that streak in all its glory.

One final interesting note. I was so blown away by Drive Angry that I needed to know who the secret talent behind the movie was. Bizarrely, other than the actors, there doesn’t seem to have been any. Director and cowriter Patrick Lussier is, like his DP, a shameless hack with credits like Terminator Genesys and Dracula 2000. Same for cowriter Todd Farmer (Jason X, My Bloody Valentine). Drive Angry seems to be the single best thing anyone behind the camera ever did by a country mile, a moment of strange and inexplicable alchemy never to be reproduced.