Drive Angry is extremely awesome and pretty lousy, with a healthy mix of awesome to shite in terms of placement. Sometimes concurrently, sometimes not. But rest assured, if there's something great going on, brace yourself for the later coming crap.
Its not a totally bad film, well at least not on balance. Its actually a film with an ambition towards becoming a junk-food-film classic, with enough camp elements to keep things very entertaining but enough shoddy execution to keep from filling the promises the film wants to keep. In that way its very typical of low-achieving/high ambition B-flicks of the VHS age. Only those didn't have the resources on display here, but the spirit is the same.
First off, the 3D is fantastic. Easily the best I've seen in a live-action film, while the script and characters might not always keep up their end of the deal, the 3D on display here never fails to present a clean and palpable feeling of depth. The biggest joy of the film is watching all the fine carnage and seeing it with a minimum of the ever-present modern action staple, the shaky-cam, which is nearly non-existent here.
The other main pleasure comes from William Fichtner as a demonic bail bondsman, who approaches his role with almost enough zeal to compensate for the passion lacking from other cast members (Cage for example). The end result is a film that's a whole lot less fun then a film about a guy who escaped from hell to hunt down his daughter's killers should be. But the high notes are high enough to make it if not a consistently great time, its at least a good one.
But I'm already getting way too wordy on a film that doesn't really aim for any sort of higher anaylysis, it aims low and suceeds only about two thirds of the time, making for a score of...
**1/2
