The Rum Diary (Bruce Robinson, 2011)

Seeing Bruce Robinson attached to The Rum Diary made me want to see the adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's novel far more than even Johnny Depp's return as the writer's stand-in. The writer-director made the greatest movie yet made about the bleak (and bleakly comic) effects of spiraling alcoholism, Withnail and I, making him theoretically perfect to bring the early days of Thompson to life. However, not five minutes passed before I instantly realized he was precisely the wrong person for this film, and the rest of the film only proved me right.

The Rum Diary, Thompson's fictionalized account of his time in Puerto Rico as a struggling writer, itself embodies a sense of emergence in the author. Imperfect as the book is, it shows Thompson on the cusp of finding himself, precisely through the substances that would later derail him. It is in Thompson's most booze-soaked, tongue-loosened moments that The Rum Diary foretells the man who would win infamy by spilling out his chemically rotted brain with each article. But Robinson's depiction of the cult hero's excess carries a sense of foreboding irony that would make him the perfect choice to survey the writer's late career, not the birth of his inspiration.

Robinson's Diary opens on the bloodshot eye of Thompson's ersatz self Paul Kemp (Johnny Depp) awakening to his first morning in Puerto Rico, where a circling biplane outside his hotel already spoils his view of the natural beach. We've just started and already it feels like the end of the party, and Paul hasn't even figured out how to get into the room fridge yet for the booze! Thompson hasn't even fully discovered drink, much less drugs, and Robinson is already wringing his hands over where it will lead.

Paul stumbles into work at his new gig at the San Juan Star, an English-language paper for the tourists who come to the American territory and never leave the hotel. The real Thompson was so green at the time that he couldn't even work at this place, and it's hard to imagine him doing so even if he could. Robinson doesn't resort to a montage to get the point across, instead letting a single scene of Paul interviewing a brain-dead bowler so rotund he resembles the cartoon humans of Wall•E and his xenophobic wife speak volumes about the insipid capitalist oblivion being sold to these sheltered white people. Outside hotel walls, Puerto Ricans live in extreme poverty, and the paper's editor (Richard Jenkins) dismisses any attempt to write about that hard truth. He says the paper exists to sell the visitors on the idea that they're living the American Dream, a term he uses so insistently and ironically it comes to resemble Milo's mantra of everyone having "a share" in his syndicate in Catch-22.

That open disdain for corrupting capitalism buoys the film, though its human embodiment, Sanderson (Aaron Eckhart), eventually drags down the narrative. On his own, Sanderson is a brilliant caricature, such a sell-out that his senses bypass normal perception for greed. He looks out over a crisp blue ocean and sees only money, planning to insert hotels and marinas that will soon turn those waters to polluted sludge and prevent the actual natives from ever seeing the ocean again, locked as they'll be behind private property fences.

Tied to his girlfriend Chenault (Amber Heard), however, Sanderson's avarice comes to offend Paul for petty reasons of jealousy rather than political disgust. Sanderson is already everything Thompson hates, so to define him primarily by his relationship to Paul's love interest cheapens the character's impact. Furthermore, the chauvinism Sanderson displays toward Chenault is meaningless considering the sexist light in which Thompson cast her, a problem Robinson fails to rectify.

Thompson's formulating political stances thus softened, it falls to his tentative discovery of the more dangerous side of substance abuse to float the film. But, as has already been said, Robinson's direction is simply too sober for what The Rum Diary needs to be. His dimmed, earthen-toned lighting resembles that of a Hopper painting, communicating a sense of loneliness and despair that clashes with the fiery indignation slowly rising in Thompson/Paul's throat like booze he hasn't yet figured how to keep down. It's the same oaken palette as Withnail and I despite showing a far more colorful location and story, transplanting the open-casket-reception tone of the former into an incongruous situation.

The Rum Diary occasionally works, even within its vaguely moralizing aesthetic premise. Giovanni Ribisi is hilarious as the half-decipherable Moberg, whose slurring shuffle and exaggeratedly bum-like appearance works as a makeshift Ghost of Christmas Future for our good Raoul Duke. Depp's impression is coherent here, revealing the presence of brain cells not yet eradicated by a cocaine- and bourbon-fueled genocide, but Ribisi shadows him with promises of mumbles and mood swings to come. To clarify, Robinson does not disserve the film by hinting at the dark road upon which drugs and alcohol will place Thompson. If anything, this film lacks the power of Withnail and I in demonizing hollow, joyless hedonism. That film ripped off crusted scabs while also finding the humor in its hopelessness; this just feels like a demented after-school special. The Rum Diary is a story that openly builds to the optimism of substance use, and Robinson can't square that with his (admittedly more mature) hindsight. It just doesn't work, robbing an already scattershot work of its flashes of power, insight, and groundwork laying.

Drive Angry

Drive Angry resides in the No Man's Land between ignorant bliss and smug self-awareness, noxious tar pit that slowly sucks down fun premises into a black morass of lazy winking and absolving self-deprecation. However, it is also the first film in a while to successfully navigate its way back and forth through this trap-filled territory. Drive Angry certainly does not work as a subversive take on grindhouse in the vein of Tarantino's Death Proof; it is not even great trash. But it's damn fun, and as soon as I finished watching it the first time I admit I immediately planned a second trip to the theater.

Having managed to avoid nearly everything regarding the film save for its absurd title, I got to experience Drive Angry's slow mounting of story elements with a degree of unknown I never enjoy anymore, not in the age of total media saturation. The opening scene of the film depicts a CGI prison in a red-coated frame. For a second, I did not even recognize it as hell, though the presence of a muscle car tearing out of the place on a bridge also threw me off the trail. I don't recall Virgil mentioning that when he showed Dante the place.

The first 30 minutes of the film veer wildly out of control, jumping any fluid kind of editing with haphazard introductions for the movie's cast list weaving an unnecessarily ornate web for only a handful of characters. I saw the film two times and was still bewildered at the lack of context for the opening barrage of images, from Nicolas Cage chasing down some rednecks with pentagrams marked on their chests to a supremely tarted-up Amber Heard crushing the testicles of her lascivious, greasy diner boss. And just when you've settled down and accepted the absurdity of the situation, along comes William Fichtner in a suit calling himself the "Accountant," always asking if Cage has just come through the area knowing full-well the answer. Those left alive by the stranger's tears through town ask the Accountant who he is and what the man has done, but he deftly avoids any exposition.

By the time pieces start to fall in place and the character name John Milton drops a huge clue for those of us who remember senior-year English, Drive Angry has amassed such an impressive horde of contrivances, loose ends and overall questions about the physical properties of certain items and people that the whole shebang nearly collapses. Then, it acts as if nothing ever happened and finally gets down to the good stuff: blatant, unabashed fetishism of every body part and overcompensating gadget.

Drive Angry knows how dumb it is and occasionally shows its hand to the audience to let us in on its cheek, but the sincere, shameless ogling pervading the film makes for a far funnier and more entertaining ride than the occasional plodding moments of overt self-awareness. Cage, toned down from his most manic work, looks increasingly withdrawn in his roles, as if the weight of his recent manic episodes on-screen, be they good (Bad Lieutenant) or bad (almost all the rest). His rage here is amusingly insular given the wild insanity of his actions, a slow burn of resentment and self-loathing that grounds the film's nonsense in the sort of dramatic seriousness that only makes a film like this funnier. Then again, these days it is not always clear whether or not the self-loathing in a Cage character reflects its actor's own feelings.

However, he looks as if he had fun here, delivering his lines with a halting relish as if he wanted to savor every last morsel of such delicious lines as, "I never disrobe before a gunfight." Milton's story unfolds so ponderously that Cage's seriousness pales in comparison to the pseudo-pathos of his character, but Cage comes out of his gloom with enough dry humor to make the convoluted issue of his daughter being murdered by Satanists (led by a Chris Gaines/Garth Brooks-lookin' Cajun Jim Jones played by Billy Burke) and his granddaughter abducted for sacrifice not as cumbersome as the pile-on of narrative could be. Heard has scant to do save shout terrified or angry responses to Milton's dour carnage, and she does not appear to have put up a fight against the too-loving gaze of the camera, which always finds the time to scan over her rear and zoom in on her eye-shadowed face. It's harder to read what she thinks of her role, as she commits to the half-tough, half-damsel Piper but occasionally gives a glance that suggests she went back to her trailer to chew out her agent.

Even if she had a blast, though, she and Cage combined could not equal the unrelenting glee with which Fichtner, a super-solid character actor, plays his role. Delighting in the mysterious yet inevitable nature of his character's origins and purpose, Fichtner ignores everyone sharing the screen with him, walking around side characters asking the Accountant's repeated questions as he consumes every piece of scenery not nailed down, casually munching cud as the characters' bewilderment perhaps reflects the actors' own. Fichtner is one of my favorite "that guys," and to see him get to let loose in a role that does not so much take advantage of his skills as let the more subtle actor get his chance to mug shamelessly. If Cage hilariously meditates on his lines, Fichtner does not need to think before spewing out some ingenious, unmistakably sinister yet delightfully bizarre threat or insult. As a villain, he is not particularly frightening, but he does not want to be. The Accountant chases down his escaped quarry not out of a need for vengeance nor even a sense of duty (though he does need to "balance the numbers"): he's just having fun playing with Milton.

I would file Drive Angry under "guilty pleasure" but it does something I've been begging dumb movies to do for some time now: it never undercuts its thick-headedness with too many winks, never tries to forgive its exposition (and my GOD is the exposition in this movie ridiculous). Because it does not attempt to pass off its bad moments as knowing jokes, they actually work as comedy, and when the actual madness kicks in, Drive Angry has inventiveness to spare. A shootout featuring Milton still inside a bar waitress is one of the most outlandish sequences in years, and the use of slow-motion for the entire sequence is cleverer than anything in a Zack Snyder movie. I continue to prefer 3D in films that use it for the kitsch gimmick it is, and the flying limbs and slow-motion bullets flying at the audience make for as good a time as the schlock of Piranha 3D. I expected to go into this film to feed my ironic love affair with the bad Nic Cage (I have a completely sincere adoration for the man when he's on his game), and instead I got a perfectly delightful bit of screwball amorality. But I have a soft-spoken for chicken-fried crap; I am, after all, from the South. Also, can we get a buddy cop film starring Nic Cage and Bill Fichtner, please?