22 Things I Learned From 'Drive Angry 3D'

1. Satanic cults have a high rate of attrition.

2. Hard asses take their coffee black, with lots of sugar.

3. No one caresses a handbrake like Amber Heard.

4. The US mid-west has been abandoned by all rational people and colonised by laconic, diner-visiting demons (see also Legion, which I can only assume is better, if only because it’s four minutes shorter).

5. Calling a slightly overweight person “fat” is a funny enough joke to sustain five minutes of screen time.

6. Real men ask for a shotgun the same way the rest of us order an espresso.

7. The sheet at the back of the garage always conceals an immaculate classic American car.

8. Hell has a poorly protected armoury (which is running low on stock – three bullets?!), and a disintegrating drawbridge of some kind.  No, really.

9. Louisiana police captains have a very relaxed dress code (and poor taste in t-shirts).

10. There’s always an old friend that lives nearby.

11. There’s always a flirty waitress (or several).

12. Never trust the FBI.

13. Women don’t bruise.

14. Nicolas Cage seems to be interested in little else these days than a self-directed retroactive career assassination.

15. David Morse has given up on life, or at the very least on cinema. (You’re not the only one, David, you’re not the only one).

16. If this film was aiming for the vibe of an apocalyptic Johnny Cash ditty then it failed, and only succeeded in making me wish it were as brief and succinct as an apocalyptic Johnny Cash ditty.

17. That this was written, edited, and directed by the same person indicates that that person should seek help.

18. A perverse, slightly intriguing performance by William Fichtner as a diabolical bounty hunter can look like a stunning exercise of comic genius when surrounded by utter, utter dreck.

19. Drive Angry 3D.  The three Ds are driving, demons, and despondency.

20. When even Nicolas Cage looks bored, you know you’re close to witnessing the very atomic structure of boredom.

21. Grindhouse this ain’t.  Shucks, this wasn’t even Machete.

22. Hell is another Nicolas Cage film.

Death Toll: A Review of 'Knowing'

A note on spoilers: if you have not seen Knowing (or 2012) and were looking forward to curling up with them on a cold Winter’s evening then a) I pity you, and b) you should probably avoid reading the below. Spoilers are not overt, but are lurking between the lines

Placing the events of 9/11 into a framework of cosmological inevitability, and frequently referencing the attacks in both dialogue and visual aesthetics, Knowing works very hard to separate historical happenings from epistemological experience. The former is elided entirely from meaningful discourse, while the latter is elevated to an organising principle whose primacy is overtaken only by religious determinism.

As an MIT professor, we can assume our protagonist John Koestler is a man with a rigorous focus upon rational explanations of the physical world. When his son receives a fifty-year-old document consisting of a sprawled mass of seemingly random numbers, it is the sequence 091101 (that is, 9/11/01) which catches his eye. One drunken night on google later and he has identified a pattern in the numbers (which is more than can be said for most people after they spend a drunken night on google) – they 'predict' all major disasters of the last fifty years, with death toll usefully appended.

Thus determinism sets in early. For all Koestler's assurances that he believes “shit happens” (his wife died in a hotel fire, of which more later), the delineation of historical flow into specifically defined disasters sites – with attendant numbering of those killed and even a GPS locator of the event – smacks of straight-jacketed human perception far more than the film-makers seem to realise. Take 9/11, the only disaster dealt with in detail: what precise GPS coordinates would be given here? The address of the World Trade Centre? A field in Pennsylvania? The Pentagon? We never discover (nor whether the death toll includes those who died later from their injuries, or from the asbestos-laced ash in the streets that day); but given the film's (and American culture's) insistence in localising the events of that day at “ground zero”, educated assumptions can be made.

There is of course the possibility I have approached the film from the wrong direction: rather than questioning the inclusion criteria of the disasters (one has only thirty-three deaths, which hardly strikes one as worthy of listing, unless of course one happens to be in the direct vicinity of it, or related to one of those unlucky thirty-three), perhaps these events were only chosen by the Cassandra whose hand sprawled those numbers on that paper because they would be the first things thrown up by a google search. In the Old Testament, Moses had to make do with plagues which affected the entire populace; in the postmodern world, foretellings of doom can be tailored to suit Western-centric search engine algorithms.

As with Roland Emmerich's by turns unintentionally hilarious and intentionally hilarious 2012, Knowing gives up on the oh-so-twentieth century notion of an identifiable apocalyptic source. The characters within these films are at the mercy of mutating neutrino particles or the like, rather than marauding alien invaders or even global warming. Both films also exhibit something of an awed attitude to scheduling: one of the heroes of 2012 (nearly all of Emmerich's films are titled after dates, a tacit acknowledgement that their substance is their events, not their characters) is drafted to write “the most important timetable in the history of mankind”: a grandiose rhetorical description for a document that must by nature lack rhetoric altogether. The sheet of numbers in Knowing is puzzled over until the content of it is transposed into the more exciting – or at least visual – mode of familial protection, at which point it is no longer of any value (Waterworld pulled something of the same trick). Likewise, once it has been made abundantly clear that shit is happening right now and there's not a damn thing we can do about it, the populace of 2012 just get on with panicking rather than troubling themselves with any further explanation.

Which is to say, once science has done its bit in conceiving of a terrible thing, it is jettisoned entirely. Koestler may be an MIT professor, but that doesn't do him a bit of good. The desperation on Nicolas Cage's face as he witnesses another terrible (but blood-free) disaster can be read as the horrible realisation that for all his scientific knowledge he is helpless. Lisa Simpson felt the same way when the skeleton of an angel was uncovered in Springfield but, as we all remember, the doubt in her non-faith-belief system was misplaced. Knowing's lunge towards religiosity in the face of (a particularly 9/11 inflected) end-of-days is much like the denouement to that episode of The Simpson's: a ploy on the part of consumer interests to guarantee high grosses (it worked: the film made back its budget four times over). “The End is Near … The End of High Prices” - in deploying apocalypticism in the marketing of a mall The Simpson's echoed George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead, while also asserting the accurate yet unappealing prospect that total consumer freedom walks hand-in-hand with the holocaustal imaginary.

Yet consumerism, like science, is a false dawn for Knowing, which peddles the safely reductionist line that we'd all be better off staying at home. Koestler's wife died in a hotel fire during a business trip, while the predicted major disasters occur on planes or subway trains (and goodness, the New York subway has never appeared such a mecca for abstractly besuited businesspeople as it does in this film). Salvation comes hand-in-ghostly-hand with a return to an ur-domesticity, even if that is a dishevelled cabin in the woods, or a cloying family hug with your estranged father.

There's no wink at the sublimity of mass death here as there was in Independence Day (remember the stripper-friend, on the roof of a skyscraper in LA, eyes as wide as her smile as she's blown to smithereens by the transubstantial glare of an alien laser-beam?), the reason for which can be explicitly traced back to 9/11. As can the obsession with choice that pervades this and Emmerich's film, but it is 'choice' in quotation marks, a choice rooted in safe populism. In the face of the President's daughter's disgust that only the rich will be saved in 2012, the pigheaded Secretary of State suggests she offer her ticket to a Chinese worker if she feels so bad about things. The passive smirk she gives by way of reply says it all: moral outrage is as much a privilege as is a room on an ark. People get chosen, they do not themselves choose, and once chosen you get with the program because to do otherwise would be to conceive of a universe that admitted the possibility of transgression, disorder, and personal agency.

Which all generates a cinema of eschatological comfort. Teleological (that is, regressive) in the same way as Will Smith's I Am Legend, Knowing peddles the line that even chaos is not chaotic. 9/11, your wife's death, your kid's partial deafness: all are cartographic points of reference on a map of divine will. Human political potential is reduced to nought, and all we're asked to do is follow the signs on our way to an inevitable and enriching (well, briefly) family reunion. Powerlessness never felt so absurd.

Flights of Fancy: An Essay on 'Con Air': Parts 1 - 3

Part 1: Introduction

“Oh well, why not,” says Stanley Goodspeed, played by Nicolas Cage, in the 1996 action spectacular The Rock. He then slams on the pedal of his stolen Lamborghini, and smashes through a plate-glass window in pursuit of a dapper ex-SAS soldier on the run in San Francisco. The moment is absurd. The absurdity is acknowledged, and offered as a pleasure in and of itself. There are plenty of such moments of heightened ridiculousness in The Rock, but the film tries to have its grenade and detonate it too, as director Michael Bay is wont to do, and so fails to fully exploit the potential for parodic excess in the action genre. This is not a reticence observed by the nadir of the 1990s Hollywood spectacle Con Air.
    Beginning with an introduction to the plot of the film, and going on to analyse several facets of it, the subsequent several blog posts will attempt to suggest how a film that seems to be empty and unremarkable spectacle is worthy of analysis.


Part 2: Every Creep and Freak On One Plane

The story goes that Don Simpson, one half of the producing partnership that also included Jerry Bruckheimer, hated the idea of Con Air. Simpson and Bruckheimer had together produced some of the most overblown and superficial films of the 1980s and 1990s, films like Top Gun, Bad Boys and The Rock. Quite what black mark the producer-auteur thought Con Air would smear on his resume we will never know – Simpson’s death in 1996 left Jerry Bruckheimer free to hire debut director Simon West and action-star of the moment Nicolas Cage and go ahead and make the Die Hard-with-prisoners-on-a-plane movie he had always wanted.
    Cage plays Cameron Poe, a hellraiser from Alabama who has turned out good by joining the US Rangers. Returning to his pregnant wife he gets into a bar-fight, kills someone with a punch, and is imprisoned by an uncaring and hypocritical legal system. Years later he is to be released, but first must “hitch a ride home” on a plane transporting “the worst of the worst” to a new “supermax” prison. Among these nasty characters are educated sociopaths (John Malkovich’s Cyrus Grissom), militant Black panther-types (Ving Rhames’ Diamond Dog) and eerily tranquil mass murderers (Steve Buscemi’s Garland Greene).
    These prisoners soon take over the plane, and Poe must retain their loyalty in order to protect his close friend (a diabetic in need of insulin) and a sexually threatened prison guard (Rachel Ticotin). They land at Carson City to offload some prisoners, then on to Lerner Air Field where a plan to switch planes goes awry. Pursued by earnest FBI agent Vince Larkin (John Cusack) the prisoners are forced to flee Lerner and soon after crash-land on the Las Vegas strip.
    The film will here be analysed for the manner in which the illogic of elements of plotting and mise-en-scene construct a pastiche of action genre templates; the depiction of America and the non-spaces the marginalized convicts are forced to function within; the use of children as a compositional element and the complicated portrayal of sociopathy and implied paedophilia; and finally the simultaneous reverence and undermining of masculine identity.


Part 3: “On Any Other Day That Might Seem Strange”: Absurdities and Violence

The overt pleasures of Con Air are the action sequences, which come thick and fast, but each carefully delineated within what are frequently similar backdrops and concepts. In his essay connecting action cinema with the adventure narratives of ancient Greek novels (via Bakhtin), Martin Flanaghan states the world of action/adventure narrative is “ruled by chance and coincidence”, and is “structured around wild detours from reality that despite their infeasibility are perfectly acceptable within the self-determined logic of the genre” (p108 in ‘The Chronotope in Action’ in Action And Adventure Cinema, edited by Yvonne Tasker). I would like to suggest that Con Air is aware of this ‘necessity of infeasibility’, as it were, and uses it to comment not just on the spatial and temporal mechanics of the action film, but also on the culture from which the imperative to create such wild worlds originates; namely, late twentieth century America.
    When Poe et al are making a break for it, only to be confronted at the rear of the plane by a corvette being dragged through the air behind them as they take off, Poe’s comment “on any other day that might seem strange” can be interpreted as “in any other genre that might be out of place.” This surreal sight is soon trumped by Cyrus threatening to kill a stuffed toy rabbit (“make a move and the bunny gets it”) at a crescendo of high drama. These are sly winks to the audience (much like that which Cage offers in the final image within the end credits), but their purpose is more interesting than easy bathetic humour.
    Fredric Jameson explains parody as a response to modernism which ridicules the “excessiveness and eccentricity” of “stylistic mannerisms”; he delineates this from pastiche, implicitly a more developed and perhaps more depressing phenomenon, as it is a similar form of mimicry but is performed “without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared with which what is being imitated is rather comic.” (Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in The Cultural Turn, pp. 4-5). A montage depicting Poe’s years in jail near the beginning of Con Air shows him working out, learning Spanish, writing to his daughter, avoiding prison riots, and learning origami. Let us repeat: the hero of this violent, adult action film learns origami. This is not a parodic moment. Perhaps if it featured within Hot Shots!, or an Airplane film we could consider it parody. But the placement within an overtly heartfelt sequence and the po(e)-facedness of delivery make it, by Jameson’s rules, pastiche.

    Con Air presents a world vacated by the normal. It responds to the increasing absurdity of Hollywood spectacle by presenting an America with no grip on reality, populated by dramatis personae who are so grotesquely not of the real world that they seem to belong to a cartoon. This is symptomatic of a move towards artificiality and immateriality that can be identified in a postmodern interpretation of the contemporary moment, as well the response of Hollywood cinema to this turn. Axiomatic of this is the presentation of bloodshed.
    In the last decade or so films with $100 million+ budgets have become increasingly ingenious in presenting violent actions without presenting violence. The Matrix created a cyber-world where any number of innocent bystanders could be mowed down – all in the name of the freedom of the human race. Comic book films show shootings and conflagrations, but without blood or corpses. Action in the 1980s and early 1990s was more visceral: before family entertainment consolidated itself as the central brand for enormous financial returns, blood and gore were good business.
    Con Air is balanced precariously on the seesaw between the squib-and-swearing fueled action the preceded and the bloodless aversion that followed. It is a violent film itself, but the surreal and overtly absurd elements detract from the unpleasantness of the violence, and seem to be a reaction to it. The ethos offered by Hollywood – that violence is spectacle, and this spectacle can, through editing and scripting, be somehow non-violent (by which I mean non-brutal, and lacking consequences) – is in Con Air boiled over into a world where nothing sticks, and logic is secondary to bedazzlement and earnestness.
    In reacting to other Hollywood films of its ilk, Con Air is responding to an absurdity with absurdity. Its critique is not satirical, political, or comprehensive. If the “wild detours from reality” of the action narrative are “perfectly acceptable with the self-determined logic of the genre”, as Flanaghan asserted above, then Con Air self-determines its own (il)logic with nihilistic abandon.