Herald rating: * *
Running time: 119 mins
Rental: Today
Review: Ewan McDonald
Nicolas Cage's career has always been kind of bipolar: for every Leaving Las Vegas you get a Con Air. For every Birdie you get a Guarding Tess. For every Bringing Out The Dead you get an 8MM, Snake Eyes or (aaargh!)
City Of Angels.
So when you team bigger-faster-louder producer Jerry Bruckheimer with three of Hollywood's wierder residents (Cage, Robert Duvall, Angelina Jolie) and remake a 1974 cult movie about car thieves, you know that you may not get something that is socially rewarding but you will get some very serious road-rage. And you do.
Memphis Raines (Cage), the greatest car thief in LA, has retired to the desert to run a gas station and kart track because his mum asked him to. She is afraid his younger brother, Kip (Giovanni Ribisi), will become a thief. He does, anyway, and unwittingly angers a nasty piece of criminality, Raymond (Christopher Eccleston), when stealing a car.
Memphis goes to see Raymond to try to set things right, but Raymond has Kip handcuffed inside a car and is threatening to crush him and sell him as scrap metal. Memphis can save Kip by stealing 50 hard-to-find cars. Memphis recruits his old pal (Robert Duvall), they assemble a very large team and set about relieving the owners of their classic vehicles.
A cop (Delroy Lindo) knows who they are and what they plan but wants to catch them at it. He figures that the key theft will be of Memphis' favourite car, a 1967 Shelby GT 350 Mustang named Eleanor, which means you get to watch Memphis and his gang steal 49 cars before The Big One.
Plot gets a little hazy and confusing round about here but Bruckheimer soon shifts into overdrive with a fairly good car chase, featuring a wrecking ball and a container playing pinball, and the final confrontation. Oh yes, Angelina Jolie is in the movie somewhere. I almost forgot about her but so did the director.
So after two hours you will have had some thrills, chuckled at some good one-liners and gone to the garage to check you locked it before you came inside.
