Gone in 60 Seconds

I celebrated my new job last Friday by packing up the Galaxie 500 with ice cold beer, fried chicken and Hostess Ring Dings and taking my wife to the Cinderella Drive-In to see "Gone in Sixty Seconds." That's right, when I walked into the Family Dollar and said I would behave better from now on, they came crawling back, begging me to work for them. I get fifty cents less per hour than I did before, but I'm once again stocking their shelves with unwanted snack foods and tube socks. It's a temporary gig until that fat-ass Roger Ebert makes me his permanent partner, but it'll pay some of the bills.

I was in a pretty good mood, fully employed and ditching my night shift claiming an eye infection. The air was cool, a big half-moon shone over the Drive-In screen and the Galaxie only stalled once on the way there. I was ready to be entertained by a shitload of car wrecks, chases and Angelina Jolie's tits. Hollywood fucked-up on every count.

"Gone in 60 Seconds" sucks in 119 minutes. How hard can it be to make an entertaining car heist movie? Get a lot of good-looking cars, a lot of hot rod drivers, and start smashing up shit. But this dog fails, and it does it in a painfully boring way. This bomb is about as fun to look at, and moves as fast, as the 1973 Ford Gran Torino for sale in the "No Excuses" nightclub parking lot.

Nicolas Cage is "Memphis" Raines, a character who needs a cutesy name because it's the only thing he has going for him. He's a retired car thief, the best there ever was. He must be because that's what every fucking character in the movie tells us. His little brother, Giovanni Ribisi, trying very hard to look like that drug-addled idiot from Stone Temple Pilots, gets himself in a lot of trouble with a very bad English man when he botches the theft of a Porsche.

Cage must come out of retirement and steal fifty of the most beautiful cars in Long Beach in 72 hours or his brother will be killed. Much to the disappointment of any audience, he spends the first 48 hours putting together his old team of crooks who have reluctantly gone straight.

The group must get the cars while badass cop with a grudge Delroy Lindo chases them. Luckily for Cage and Co., Lindo is hampered by his impossibly lame and unnecessary sidekick. There is also a gang of rival thieves who show up a couple times in the plot and then are inexplicably dumped.

Is the story about 50 beautiful cars? Well, the audience only sees about ten, and then the camera doesn't even give a shit about them. It's too busy giving us hipster Hollywood's interpretation of the rest of the world: all gritty, dark and artfully smudged with dirt. The movie is shot almost entirely indoors or at night, and in close-ups of actors with unfortunate facial hair. Lose the mustache, Angelina.

It's a bad idea for a movie about pretty cars not to bother to let us see them. In fact, the only time the camera lingers on anything is during the credits, when we see ten fucking minutes of family photos. For fuck's sake, this isn't an arthouse flick about POWs, it's a Goddamn big budget movie about stealing cars.

Is the story about car chases? It sure as fuck should be, but there's only one, at the end. It's good, but it's not worth waiting an hour and a half for. One fucking car chase. The movie is paced like a Japanese Godzilla movie where the first 80% of the flick is spent showing scientists wondering where Godzilla is, and then in the last fifteen minutes he shows up and beats the crap out of Tokyo. But those movies were held back by budget, this one is held back by a Goddamn pretentious, and I bet goateed, screenwriter named Scott Rosenberg. The fucker probably thinks he's creating great characters.

Is it a story about a brother saving a brother? Ribisi isn't worth saving in his "Look, I'm a Hollywood guy playing grungy" apparel and mustache. Besides, the English villain isn't scary enough to worry anyone but a dentist. We're told he's bad, many times by many characters, but the only threatening thing he does in person is make chairs and squeal like a baby when "This Old House" is on TV. Okay, I made up that last part, but Christopher Ecclestone does snarl and practice carpentry.

I'm all for strong characters and plots that are their driven by their internal needs, and all of that other "good" movie shit, but if given the choice between lame characters talking too much or Rolls Royce and Ferraris smashing into each and falling off bridges, I'll take the cars.

Rosenberg has everyone talk and talk and talk the way that nobody does in real life, but the fucking screenwriters in their Starbucks wish we did. He fills his characters with so much shit it pours out their ears. Robert Duvall describes the villain as "A jackal tearing at the soft belly of our fair city." Long Beach? Jackal? Soft belly? Only asshole screenwriters with no friends think people talk like this.

Nicolas Cage is the best car thief ever. How do we know that? Not from seeing him steal cars, that's for fucking sure. It's because every other character must say it at some point. Angelina Jolie is a Ferrari whiz. We only know this because she crawls out from under one once. Duvall is a master at restoring old cars. Guess how we know. It's sure as hell isn't by looking at his filthy warehouse where we never see a single finished car.

Rosenberg and director Sena also throw absurd, obvious obstacles at the heroes that have no impact on the story. A rival car gang shows up, is about as scary as Nancy Drew with a yeast infection, and is defeated quickly and easily in a smug, self-satisfied scene that required absolutely no creative effort. In one of lamest plot contrivances of the year, a dumbass thief steals a 1983 Cadillac for absolutely no reason. And he happens to steal one full of drugs... right before the cops show up! I think this scene was supposed to be funny, but it's too insulting to the intelligence to qualify. Another scene, allegedly funny, has a dog eat several car keys and the heroes have to feed it a bunch of laxatives and get it to shit the keys out. Oh, that's fucking brilliant comedy. What asshole executive in Hollywood sat back in his chair and said "great stuff!" to that?

The cast coasts through this movie, not even trying. Cage might as well be asleep, Jolie might as well be overdosed in a gutter somewhere. Angelina, you are now officially off my "must fuck" list. Duvall should be ashamed of himself. Lindo does what he does best, which is stand around looking like a big, distinguished black man who tenses his jaw a lot. Only Giovanni Ribisi breaks away from the pack, and that's because he thought this was a sequel to "The Other Sister"; he continues to play a retard convincingly well.

Two fingers for "Gone in 60 Seconds." It's saved from one finger by the decent car chase at the end. Five fingers for the Cinderella Drive-In, where a double feature is $7 a person, you bring your own food and, from the looks of it, they leave you alone if you're humping, sucking or blowing in your car. The Cinderella Drive-In is at Hampden and Santa Fe in Englewood, Colorado.