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Despite the danger of getting numbed by seeing every single flick that comes to town, I try to keep an open mind; you never know when you might be surprised by something. That was the case with Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie's latest movie, a remake of what some consider to be the pinnacle of all those subversive 70s car-chase films such as Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry; Vanishing Point; Ron Howard's Eat My Dust and Grand Theft Auto; Death Race 2000; The Gumball Rally; Two-Lane Highway, etc. Despite some unfavorable advance reviews, I got out of my dinged-up 147,000-mile Nissan Sentra and crossed the theater parking lot feeling not only a lot safer than I expected to be traversing that same space after my fellow moviegoers had undergone a couple hours of high-octane internal-combustion frenzy, but sincerely optimistic. Mission: Impossible 2 reawakened the latent velophilia, and I was ready to rock.
Sure enough, there was a surprise waiting inside, and the lights hadn't even gone down yet. Aside from one semi-professional movie critic, the enthusiastic audience for Gone in Sixty Seconds was made up entirely of two factions that, were it not for an overpowering common interest, wouldn't be too likely to associate with each other: gearheads and lesbians.
Lots of folks in NASCAR and Crane Cams hats were to be expected. The original Gone..., filmed in 1974 by stunt man/director Henry B. "Toby" "the Jackie Chan of car crashes" Halicki, set a benchmark for four-wheeled excess, crunching 90 cars in an hour-and-a-half, climaxing (if you can call it that) in a chase scene that lasts 40 minutes.* And this version is produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, so much motorized conflagration seemed assured. Likewise, the presence of so many passionate sisters made sense as soon as I recalled an encounter at Blockbuster a few days before, when two young women in the "New Releases" section were observed literally fondling a box for Jolie's Oscar-winning Girl, Interrupted (not that I have a predilection for voyeurism, mind you) and saying things that defy relating here without so many blanked-out letters it would look like an explicit "Wheel of Fortune" (which, if you think about it, might be kinda fun; that's what I tried to tell them, anyway). With the trailers featuring a bee-stung, hip-huggered, blond-dreadlocked Jolie drawling, "Well, hel-lo ladies..." like so much glycerin cake-frosting, no wonder the spirit of Sappho was in the air. Too bad both contingents would have to go away mostly disappointed.
Cage plays Randall "Memphis" Raines, a former L.A. car thief (and compatriot to lots of other people with nicknames) so prolific and efficient, we're told, that local auto thefts declined 47 percent when he acquiesced to his dear mother's wishes and went legit. For six years he's sublimated his weakness for exotic cars by teaching little kids how to faster circulate a go-cart track. He gets drafted back into the life when estranged younger brother Kip (Giovanni Ribisi) is threatened with severe flattening after a botched job for psycho-Brit mobster Dominic Colitri (Christopher Eccleston, from eXistenZ). If Memphis will step in and complete the contract, which requires procuring 50 ultra-exclusive vehicles (HumVees, Lamborghinis, Porsches, a Rolls stretch limo, and the like) in just four days, then Colitri won't squash Kip into little thieving pancakes in a junk compactor. With Mom's blessing, Randall is back in the biz.
First thing he does is reassemble the not-overly-rehabilitated old gang, which in addition to ex-flame Sara "Sway" Wayland (Jolie) includes Otto (Robert Duvall, like Cage a past player in Bruckheimer's deafening, hyperkinetic jaunts; between them they've done Days of Thunder, The Rock, and Con Air), Donnie (Chi McBride, best known from "The John Laroquette Show"), and mysteriously mute "Sphinx" (Vinnie Jones, who was the fatherly hit man Big Chris in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels). Kip recruits some new-school technogeeks to provide updated hardware support, and before you can say "the Club," a plan is in place to swipe all fifty cars in 12 hours, better to keep the cops off-balance. That's important because Memphis' obsessive former nemesis, Det. Castleback (Delroy Lindo), is on his trail, as is a murderous rival gang.
You'd think, with a setup of 50 ultrasonic cars to swipe and Jolie's portentous first appearance, all lipstick and grease, sensually sliding around on her back in a mechanics' bay, GI60S would be a nonstop riot of smoking Michelins and fuel-injected libido. What a letdown that not only do we get very few actual chases, but the big final set piece -- Cage thrashing a primo 67 Shelby Mustang GT500 -- relies as much on animation as on slick shifting; one just doesn't get as worked up for the climax when that wrecking ball swinging parabolic death is obviously computer-generated. Likewise, the principals' all-too-understated sexual tension never gets any further than a brief front-seat liaison even less rewarding than that awful, similar scene with Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas in Random Hearts. In fact, this whole movie is like terribly unsatisfying sex; it's bad enough that the foreplay is uninspired, but it's drawn-out uninspired, with a payoff that's both brief and late. When you go in expecting Mad Max, or at least Mad Love, it's a big letdown.
Things might have been bearable had the lengthy buildup been even just a little more interesting in either the automotive or autoerotic department. But other than too-little input from a great supporting cast (especially Jones, who's the most interesting character involved), what we get mostly is florid exchanges and strained slang (scripted by Scott Michael Rosenberg, who crafted much better words for Beautiful Girls and Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead before Bruckheimer put him to work on Con Air) like "I did it for the cars -- gleaming and Marina Blue, Sunfire Yellow, and Marlboro Red, waiting to be plucked" and "he's boosting all the dark ponies." Throw in yet another bowel-oriented subplot, about a junkyard dog that's swallowed the keys to three Mercedes (Mercedeses?), and Gone in Sixty Seconds turns out to be less fun than cruising in your parents' fake-wood-paneled Town and Country station wagon. C-
*Halicki only directed two more movies before dying in a stunt during the 1989 filming of GI60S2.
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