This is a wonderful movie about ex-ranger Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage) who mistakenly kills a man in a fight to defend his wife's honor, (very dramatic, in the rain which is concluded by "Frank" the presumed owner of the bar checking the attacker's pulse and pronouncing, "Oh, he's dead Cameron"). Poe then goes to jail for a period of time, but all of this happens in the first minute of the movie. The movie starts when he meets his parole and gets on a plane to go home to his beautiful wife, and daughter whom he has never met.
This movie has so many great things about it. First of all, there is a "give everyone shit" attitude throughout the movie amongst most of the characters with nothing being taboo. People are made fun of for race, ethnicity, accents, you name it. Most hilariously by a young Dave Chappelle as "Pinball" a talkative yet good natured inmate with a drug problem.
John Malkovitch and Ving Rhames do an excellent job of being the intelligent mastermind criminals who are always a step ahead of the DEA and Marshall's office (headed by a squirrely but well-intentioned John Cusack) while Danny Trejo and Steve Buscemi do an excellent job of being the deeply mentally deranged and psychotic criminals. There is an especially haunting scene with Buscemi where he shares a cup of tea with a little girl in a drained pool in the middle of an abandoned airfield. Lending this scene some extra weight was the profession from Buscemi we get a couple of scenes before, how after killing 30 people he, "drove through three states wearing one little girls' head as a hat."
Cage is in full form, spouting what are supposed to be honorable lines in what is supposed to be an Alabama accent. The best of which famously, happens in a fight over a present for his daughter that results in him killing another inmate in the weird air shaft underbelly of the plane then lamenting, "Why couldn't you just put the bunny back in the box?"
Armed only with shoulder length greasy tresses, bulging muscles and a not too clean wifebeater, Cage manages to "save the fucking day" Meanwhile, there's so many mentions of propane and scenes of propane tanks you'd think Simon West had share in Chevron.
The final scenes of the movie come to a dramatic head, with Poe taking on not only the whole plane of convicts but even more metaphysical dilemmas, like the existence of God. In one of the best scenes ever, Poe gets shot in the arm and keeps advancing, showing that he will NEVER BACK DOWN. And finally, in one of the best scenes of iconic destruction since Independence Day, the plane "lands" on the Las Vegas strip. But just when you think it's over, it's not- even after the intense plane crash there's still another high volume chase involving an ambulance and two motorcycles and death by pulverization for one lucky individual. Only after all this does it then rain money.
In beautiful symmetric symmetry, the movie begins and ends to the same song, the one and only, "How Do I Live" by Leann Rimes. But don't you worry, Sweet Home Alabama is in there a couple of times, how could it not be?
No comments:
Post a Comment