Gone in 60 Seconds
I have a confession to make. Children, I'm a motorhead - always have been, and with a little luck, always will be. It starts innocently enough - Tonka Trucks, Hot Wheels and pedal cars but eventually becomes an obsessive relationship with anything whose heart beats not in flesh, but in V8 power, tight shift patterns and the lope of a high-lift cam. (A little leather is OK, too.) These relationships outlast presidential administrations, government over-regulation and OPEC oil price gouging, wars and rumors of wars and personal interaction with other humans. Why? Cars are honest and simple. There's nothing like the feeling of knowing that your Nova-wrapped 454 stroker that you built with your own hands could, if it had a suitable attachment point, stop the Earth from rotating, and all that power is at your command, to be used for good or evil as you see fit. Anyone who tells you that a car is just transportation has probably never owned a REAL car, and wouldn't know a Top Fuel dragster from a drag queen. Excuse me, I've started to froth..........
So...every once and a while a "car" moovie comes out, and I and all the the rest of the great fraternity of gearheads young and old dust off our rides and cruise on out to see it. This time around it's "Gone In 60 Seconds", with Nicolas Cage, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi, Robert Duvall, Delroy Lindo and Will Patton. Written by Scott Michael Rosenberg and directed by Dominic Sena. MPAA rating PG-13 for violence, sexuality, language and carbon monoxide. Run time 121 minutes.
I'll be honest with you, I went to see "Gone In 60 Seconds" with mighty low expectations, having seen the original 1974 flick that this was borrowed from in countless late-night Rolox Window moovie spectaculars, and I was only mildly surprised. But first, the good news. This moovie moves. There are very few slow spots in "Gone In 60 Seconds", and what few there are seem to be related to failures in the normally snappy edit. The rest of the news isn't that great.
The plot centers on Memphis Raines (Cage), a retired car thief, who is asked to make an encore appearance in L.A. to save the unworthy hide of his kid brother Kip (Ribisi) who has failed to deliver on a promised order of fifty rare and unusual cars. Memphis turns his back on his new straight life and contacts his old chop-shop buddy Otto Halliwell (Duvall) and tries to put together his old gang. What he winds up with is a stems and seeds ragtag assemblage of car thieves, including his old flame "Sway" (Jolie) and her lips. The gig is this: from a laundry list of fifty exotic cars, steal and deliver all fifty of them to a container ship in Long Beach within three days - payday: 200 large.
Two flies in the 40 weight - one in the person of doggedly determined Detective Roland Castlebeck (Lindo) who sees Raines' return to L.A. as a sign of something bad about to happen. The other is a car on the list - a 1967 GT 350 Shelby Mustang - which had, in the past, proved to be Raines' nemesis, a car that wouldn't allow itself to be stolen. I'm sure I don't know what the Mustang was thinking, as someone already ruined its clean profile with the addition of about three thousand dollars worth of those damn twenty inch billet wheels and low profile rubber at the corners. That's as wrong as drag racing Toyota Camrys.
The car napping caper is on, and we see Raines and his band of auto erotic bad boys and girls slim-jimming and hot-wiring everything from the Shelby to Ferraris, a Hemi-Cuda, Panteras, a 1950 Merc lead sled which looks a lot like the one that Stallone brutalized in "Cobra", a handful of Mercedeses, um, Mercedi; and anything and everything East of the Munstermobile and a green metalflake Packard school bus in Oxnard.
This brings us to the point of the whole moovie - about time, eh? This is a cinematic car show, period. You get to ogle and drive, vicariously, some pretty tough iron in "Gone In 60 Seconds", and courtesy of cinematographer Paul Cameron, and editor Tom Muldoon, you'll have high-octane nailbiting fun doing it. Just don't pay any attention to the characters or what they're doing while they're doing it. If you try to make sense out of anything that anyone says or does in this moovie, you'll blow your clutch in the parking lot. This plot has more holes in it than a bachelor's briefs. The dialogue is moronic at best, and most of the actors are zombified - tragically, the worst of the bunch is Nicolas Cage. I mean, what happened to that guy? Go back and watch "Moonstruck" or even "It Could Happen to You" and tell me you don't think the pod people nabbed THAT Nicolas Cage and replaced him with this pale drone. The Coppola genes just aren't working.
Two of the better performances in "Gone In 60 Seconds" are turned in by Delroy Lindo as the frustrated lawman and by Vinnie Jones as a seemingly mute, but tougher than a four-bolt main knuckle-dragger called The Sphinx, who finally speaks in the last scene of the film, and proves himself to be the only marginally intelligent member of the whole gang.
I would have expected a lot more action in a moovie like this, and what there is can be pretty good. There's some real weirdness though. In one of the weirdest scenes, all the combatants gather in the garage hangout, and groove to about sixteen bars of War doing "Low Rider", as though it were the national anthem. Raines then twitches a little, and they all get down to stealin'. Huh?
When they hot wire the aforementioned shaved Merc, someone took the time while starting it up to look for the switch that ignites the exhaust, so that there would plenty of "Grease"-style flames spewing out of the chrome tips. Low profile? You betcha.
Then, during the big chase scene - actually, there is only one chase, by the way - Raines finds himself pursued by about three hundred police cars and half as many helicopters, led by Detective Castlebeck. The entire police circus finds itself following Raines into the Los Angeles River - not what we level headed Midwesterners would call a river, but a huge concrete flood control ditch that every other L.A. moovie chase seems to wind up in eventually - whereupon Raines flicks a magic "nitrous" switch, which apparently ignites a couple of solid rocket boosters, and he eludes them all as he approaches the speed of light. Well, almost. But wait, there's more.
Later, Raines runs out of room when he encounters a HUGE wreck on a freeway overpass - cars, wreckers, ambulances and cops everywhere with Detective Castlebeck and the cavalry in hot pursuit - what will he do? Simple, he backs up about two miles, runs through the gears, and launches himself OVER the wreck - must have done 500 feet in the air. Now, I haven't spent much time driving in Los Angeles, and I've NEVER driven over a wreck on a Los Angeles freeway, but I've always gotten the impression that even if you have all of the LAPD chasing you, along with the FBI, the CIA and Janet Reno on a Vespa - you just don't jack around with CalTran. I'm surprised they didn't shoot him down. Kinda wish they had - it would have saved us from the horrible drive-off-into-the-sunset ending after the opposite-sides-of-the-law-meet-and-respect-each-other-in-the-end showdown. I have now run completely out of hyphens. And reasons to go on.
Simply put, if you want to see lots of interesting cars driven at breakneck speeds ona big screen by people that you wouldn't let your daughter sit next to in traffic court, this moovie has your name all over it. If you just want pure escape with a light plot, no writing and no acting, you're home free. It won't lose much in video.
My (barely) two cows liked it just because they never get to drive fast at home.
So...every once and a while a "car" moovie comes out, and I and all the the rest of the great fraternity of gearheads young and old dust off our rides and cruise on out to see it. This time around it's "Gone In 60 Seconds", with Nicolas Cage, Angelina Jolie, Giovanni Ribisi, Robert Duvall, Delroy Lindo and Will Patton. Written by Scott Michael Rosenberg and directed by Dominic Sena. MPAA rating PG-13 for violence, sexuality, language and carbon monoxide. Run time 121 minutes.
I'll be honest with you, I went to see "Gone In 60 Seconds" with mighty low expectations, having seen the original 1974 flick that this was borrowed from in countless late-night Rolox Window moovie spectaculars, and I was only mildly surprised. But first, the good news. This moovie moves. There are very few slow spots in "Gone In 60 Seconds", and what few there are seem to be related to failures in the normally snappy edit. The rest of the news isn't that great.
The plot centers on Memphis Raines (Cage), a retired car thief, who is asked to make an encore appearance in L.A. to save the unworthy hide of his kid brother Kip (Ribisi) who has failed to deliver on a promised order of fifty rare and unusual cars. Memphis turns his back on his new straight life and contacts his old chop-shop buddy Otto Halliwell (Duvall) and tries to put together his old gang. What he winds up with is a stems and seeds ragtag assemblage of car thieves, including his old flame "Sway" (Jolie) and her lips. The gig is this: from a laundry list of fifty exotic cars, steal and deliver all fifty of them to a container ship in Long Beach within three days - payday: 200 large.
Two flies in the 40 weight - one in the person of doggedly determined Detective Roland Castlebeck (Lindo) who sees Raines' return to L.A. as a sign of something bad about to happen. The other is a car on the list - a 1967 GT 350 Shelby Mustang - which had, in the past, proved to be Raines' nemesis, a car that wouldn't allow itself to be stolen. I'm sure I don't know what the Mustang was thinking, as someone already ruined its clean profile with the addition of about three thousand dollars worth of those damn twenty inch billet wheels and low profile rubber at the corners. That's as wrong as drag racing Toyota Camrys.
The car napping caper is on, and we see Raines and his band of auto erotic bad boys and girls slim-jimming and hot-wiring everything from the Shelby to Ferraris, a Hemi-Cuda, Panteras, a 1950 Merc lead sled which looks a lot like the one that Stallone brutalized in "Cobra", a handful of Mercedeses, um, Mercedi; and anything and everything East of the Munstermobile and a green metalflake Packard school bus in Oxnard.
This brings us to the point of the whole moovie - about time, eh? This is a cinematic car show, period. You get to ogle and drive, vicariously, some pretty tough iron in "Gone In 60 Seconds", and courtesy of cinematographer Paul Cameron, and editor Tom Muldoon, you'll have high-octane nailbiting fun doing it. Just don't pay any attention to the characters or what they're doing while they're doing it. If you try to make sense out of anything that anyone says or does in this moovie, you'll blow your clutch in the parking lot. This plot has more holes in it than a bachelor's briefs. The dialogue is moronic at best, and most of the actors are zombified - tragically, the worst of the bunch is Nicolas Cage. I mean, what happened to that guy? Go back and watch "Moonstruck" or even "It Could Happen to You" and tell me you don't think the pod people nabbed THAT Nicolas Cage and replaced him with this pale drone. The Coppola genes just aren't working.
Two of the better performances in "Gone In 60 Seconds" are turned in by Delroy Lindo as the frustrated lawman and by Vinnie Jones as a seemingly mute, but tougher than a four-bolt main knuckle-dragger called The Sphinx, who finally speaks in the last scene of the film, and proves himself to be the only marginally intelligent member of the whole gang.
I would have expected a lot more action in a moovie like this, and what there is can be pretty good. There's some real weirdness though. In one of the weirdest scenes, all the combatants gather in the garage hangout, and groove to about sixteen bars of War doing "Low Rider", as though it were the national anthem. Raines then twitches a little, and they all get down to stealin'. Huh?
When they hot wire the aforementioned shaved Merc, someone took the time while starting it up to look for the switch that ignites the exhaust, so that there would plenty of "Grease"-style flames spewing out of the chrome tips. Low profile? You betcha.
Then, during the big chase scene - actually, there is only one chase, by the way - Raines finds himself pursued by about three hundred police cars and half as many helicopters, led by Detective Castlebeck. The entire police circus finds itself following Raines into the Los Angeles River - not what we level headed Midwesterners would call a river, but a huge concrete flood control ditch that every other L.A. moovie chase seems to wind up in eventually - whereupon Raines flicks a magic "nitrous" switch, which apparently ignites a couple of solid rocket boosters, and he eludes them all as he approaches the speed of light. Well, almost. But wait, there's more.
Later, Raines runs out of room when he encounters a HUGE wreck on a freeway overpass - cars, wreckers, ambulances and cops everywhere with Detective Castlebeck and the cavalry in hot pursuit - what will he do? Simple, he backs up about two miles, runs through the gears, and launches himself OVER the wreck - must have done 500 feet in the air. Now, I haven't spent much time driving in Los Angeles, and I've NEVER driven over a wreck on a Los Angeles freeway, but I've always gotten the impression that even if you have all of the LAPD chasing you, along with the FBI, the CIA and Janet Reno on a Vespa - you just don't jack around with CalTran. I'm surprised they didn't shoot him down. Kinda wish they had - it would have saved us from the horrible drive-off-into-the-sunset ending after the opposite-sides-of-the-law-meet-and-respect-each-other-in-the-end showdown. I have now run completely out of hyphens. And reasons to go on.
Simply put, if you want to see lots of interesting cars driven at breakneck speeds ona big screen by people that you wouldn't let your daughter sit next to in traffic court, this moovie has your name all over it. If you just want pure escape with a light plot, no writing and no acting, you're home free. It won't lose much in video.
My (barely) two cows liked it just because they never get to drive fast at home.