GONE IN 60 SECONDS PG-13
Starring Nicolas Cage, Angelina Jolie, Robert Duval, Delroy Lindo, and Giovanni Ribisi
Eric says: **** (4)
Oh, that Jerry Bruckheimer! He must apparently have a clause in his contract that all movies he has a hand in will have approximately the same decibel level as a jet flying four feet over your head. GI6S continues in that tradition with the story of a guy named Memphis Raines who must save his brother from the Evil Foreigner (first popularized in Die Hard) by leading a rag-tag team to steal 50 classic and rare cars in one week (for "plot reasons", they end up doing all the thefts in one night).
The first thing that we notice is how disjointed the whole film is. I, unlike my fellow reviewers, have nothing against quick-hit, music video style editing. In this case, though, we never get to linger on anything. It's too crazy. The second thing we notice is how they are trying to force us to see it all as fun. There's even a scene where Memphis is telling Mom what he must do, and she approves, since it's only to help her other son. That way we'd feel absolved of grand theft auto x50 as a sin, assuming that we cared about the characters at all.
Nicolas Cage seems to be playing "Nicolas Cage" here, a charactature of others he's done before. Jolie is pleasing as his ex-flame and sidekick, but given nothing else to do here but purr and shovel on the innuendo. All of the other actors just plug in their set roles and call it a day.
There is one exciting part of a scene where Memphis is screaming through some old aquaducts in a classic muscle car and we occasionally see a perspective as if a camera was mounted on the hood itself. That trick very effectively conveys the sense of speed and borderline out-of-control. Too bad the director and script couldn't ellicit the same from the humans in this film. I do like the title though, because it explains exaxtly how long memories of the movie stayed with me after I left the theatre.