Gone in Sixty Seconds - 2000

"Gone in Sixty Seconds" - 2000
Dir. by Dominic Sena - 1 hr. 58 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollifield

I'm not going to represent "Gone in Sixty Seconds" as any kind of good movie.  Having said that, I've probably watched it half a dozen times, and I've been wanting to watch it again for a few months now.  Considering all of the actors involved here, this film underachieves.  But then again, there's sometimes comfort in a paint-by-numbers story, like the comfort in repeating rituals.  Plus, goofball Nicolas Cage.

Memphis Raines (Nicolas Cage) runs a go-kart park in the middle of nowhere, but is pulled back into his previous life of crime through his younger brother's errors.  Raymond Calitri (Christopher Eccleston), a British woodworker/criminal boss, hired Kip (Giovanni Ribisi) to steal some cars, and he didn't deliver.  Since obviously the price for failure is death, only Memphis can save Kip, by finishing the job.  The job?  Stealing fifty cars in three days.  That means Memphis is going to need a crew.  And then they steal some cars, with the clock ticking.

"Gone in Sixty Seconds" is like the gearhead version of "Ocean's Eleven."  Not in quality, of course.  There are no elegantly-planned heists, this isn't a crew of fashionably-dressed rogues.  It's Nic Cage and a team of neuroses leading a bunch of stereotype-filling weirdos on a mission of brute force: steal everything, and drive fast while doing it.  For Kip.  And I have absolutely no problem with any of that.  I'm not sure that one could make the case that having better dialogue, or more well-rounded characters, or really anything other than what's already on the screen would have improved the end result.  I mean, I wouldn't have dressed the one woman in the movie, Angelina Jolie, in a series of potato sacks, and I wouldn't have given her pseudo-bleached blonde dreadlocks, either.  I might have made the enemies of the Raines brothers (that would be the police on his trail, played by Delroy Lindo and Timothy Olyphant, and the aforementioned evil British woodworker) a little more formidable, but it's not that kind of movie.

For a car movie, there's an awful lot of oohing and aahing over the vehicles, and there are some pretty sweet whips here, but director Dominic Sena never seems to take any visual delight in the machines that all of these gearheads are driving around.  There are no loving shots of classic cars, no emphasis on them at all.  The chase scenes are all rapid-cut monstrosities, with no real attention paid to what's involved.  If you're showing a lion chasing a zebra in the jungle, at least give us the opportunity to appreciate what a lion and a zebra are.  And again, this doesn't really matter much to the end product.  "Gone in Sixty Seconds" delivers exactly what it promises - Nic Cage being a little weird while trying to get one over on the man.  But it's also morally defensible, because he's doing it for his kid brother.  And also, screw that British guy and his silly benches.

Even with all of these things being provable facts, "Gone in Sixty Seconds" is still pretty fun.  This kind of story gets told over and over again, and it doesn't seem to get old.  There's a kind of comfort in watching the reluctant hero having to reassemble his army of misfits.  Then we get to watch this army accomplish what seems impossible, until something goes wrong near the end.  And usually, then success.  And all of this while we have to endure the quirks of the man himself.

That story works.  You can plug in any batch of actors, and as long as the goal is action-oriented, you've pretty much got a functional movie.  Sometimes you can add in bits and twists, but that's not that important.  "Gone in Sixty Seconds" is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch.  And the same way that I'll more than likely eat another PB&J, I'll probably end up watching this silly movie again, too.

2 / 5 - TV (HD)

Escape Plan - 2013

"Escape Plan" - 2013
Dir. by Mikael Hafstrom - 1 hr. 55 min.

Official Trailer

by Clayton Hollfield

First off, Sylvester Stallone has a really lumpy face.  That's actually an asset in films like this, but it stood out upon watching "Escape Plan," and I thought I'd get that out of the way.  Also of note, "Escape Plan" isn't going to go down in the top handful of films that either Stallone or co-star Arnold Schwarzenegger has done, but at the same time, it wasn't "Wild Hogs" or "Space Cowboys," with constant jokes about how old the stars are, and their assortments of balms and ointments.  Instead, this is a straight-up thriller, basically physically solving a seemingly unsolvable puzzle, and makes good use of the people involved, and if you're down with this sort of thing, you won't regret watching it.

Ray Breslin (Stallone) make a living escaping from prisons.  Like, super max security prisons, even from solitary confinement.  He owns a security consulting firm built around selling his particular skill-set to those who would need it, abetted by his "techno-thug," Hush (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson), resident female skeptic, Abigail (Amy Ryan), and business specialist, Lester Clark (Vincent D'Onofrio).  A woman comes in with a dodgy offer, claiming to be from the C.I.A., but with impossible and unfriendly circumstances, and yet with a sufficiently attractive fistful of dollars.  So a day later, Ray is abducted and thrown into a very daunting and harsh prison.  Upon landing in the prison, Emil (Schwarzenegger) slowly befriends Ray, and they work together to first figure out where the hell they are, and then to find a way out of where they are.

I joked ahead of time that I was going to be sorely disappointed if there weren't any explosions here, and that nearly happened.  "Escape Plan" relies a lot more heavily on tension, and personal physical violence (and a pressing system) than pyrotechnics.  And even though both Stallone and Schwarzenegger are clearly still in pretty good shape, it's not a shirtless kind of movie, nor a wall-to-wall action kind of movie.  This is about solving a puzzle when there seemingly aren't any clues to start with, and surviving the circumstances.  While I found the set-up interesting (at least interesting enough to catch the movie in the first place), I can't say that the film gives you a chance to solve things for yourself.  Honestly, the solutions are too complicated to do that, but when Ray breaks out of the first prison (to show you that he's really good at this, instead of just telling you that and hoping you'll take their word for it), I think viewers will find themselves more amazed that this character can make something out of nearly nothing than seeing the puzzle and having the character beat them to a solution.

The suspense of the bigger job that Ray is hired for is enough to carry the movie.  Although both stars bust off a couple of good one-liners along the way, this is also not the kind of free-wheeling, blowing up everything while caring not even a little bit kind of film.  I bring this up because a big part of why someone would want to go see "Escape Plan" is also the same reason that the two "Expendables" movies have done well - nostalgia.  And this film is not like a lost production from the 1980s.  To everyone's credit, they are not just trying to repackage an old product and pass it off as being fresh; they've made a movie where the main characters are older because they are, and they're not trying to pretend they're not.  "Escape Plan" also doesn't feel like the sort of movie that could have starred anyone.  If it were Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson here, you might question if either of them were really smart enough to be an escape artist, specializing in impossible situations (no insult to either, but neither man has made a career playing brilliant men to date).  The main annoyance I had was that the people who had weird quirks were immediately obviously bad guys (because they had quirks instead of death glares), but I can't get too mad about it.  This is not a stage production of "Hamlet."

On the whole, I was glad that I caught "Escape Plan," and especially on a big screen.  It's not going to blow anyone's mind, it's probably not going to be in line for any year-end awards.  But it's intended to be a couple of hours of entertainment, preferably for people who have enjoyed Stallone's and Schwarzenegger's work over the years, and who don't feel the need to nitpick things to death.  I mean, it's Rambo and the Terminator side-by-side, and that's pretty cool.  I can't imagine needing to watch it again, but there are always colds and viruses floating around, and oddball movies on cable all around the clock.

2 / 5 - Theatre