GONE IN 60 SECONDS (2000)

Steal 50 cars in 72 hours. That’s the gist of the entire story.

Nicolas Cage is the greatest car thief in the known universe. But he’s retired. So, in order to pull off a needlessly overly complicated job in an unnecessarily short amount of time, gangster Christopher Eccleston threatens to force Cage’s lil’ brother, Giovanni Ribisi, to watch a Will Smith movie…or was it kill him? Hum, I can’t remember. Either way it’s a horrible punishment and Cage understands the seriousness of the situation. So, he assembles a 2 kool 4 skool group of forgettable dorks (and Robert Duvall) to help him steal 50 high-end whips in 72 hours. At the same time, there are two police detectives (Delroy Lindo and Timothy Olyphant) following leads and eventually discovering the invention of the blacklight.

GONE IN 60 SECONDS is an interesting callback to the dark days before the Fast & Furious movies and it helps me appreciate the series even more than I already do. On paper, 60 Seconds has the ingredients for an awesome cheesy guilty pleasure fast car movie, but, sadly, it’s unable to turn those ingredients into an awesome movie. Instead, it’s just kinda…meh. There are no standout moments, the characters are all one-dimensional, the car chases are boring, almost zero regard by any of the characters concerning the immediate danger they’re in, the dialog is forgettable bland chatter, most of the acting is on cruise control and the entire look of the film is just off. Like why are all the daytime scenes so brown?

I've seen GONE IN 60 SECONDS a few times over the years and every single time I go into it hoping that it's gonna be awesome and that maybe last time I saw it I was wrong, but then I watch it and end up thinking "This is it?" It's disappointing because, beforehand, in my handsome brain I see this insanely awesome story full of colourful characters and badass action, but then the reality is a simplistic, by-the-numbers car chase movie...with boring car chases. Overall, it's a watchable film, but it misses that spark that would make it dope. Also, I could never get over the fact that our heroes are literally car thieves! So, like no matter what their reasonings are…they’re still causing innocent people massive hardships due to their property being stolen. And we're suppose to be rooting for these people? Fuck them. And don’t even get me started on the innocent people injured from all of the car wrecks.

Also, for no reason in particular, I wanna give a quick shoutout to whoever did the casting for THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS. You deserve a Gallo 12 and a Gallo 24.

Original - Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)

THE BAD BATCH (2016)

Imagine if you had an interesting visual concept for a 6-minute long music video and then stretched that concept out to 118 minutes.

Set in some kind of low-budget dystopian future, THE BAD BATCH opens with a pretty chick with a killer body, Arlen (Suki Waterhouse), being locked behind a huge fence in the desert.  She turns and wanders off into the wasteland.  Within a day, she's kidnapped by cannibals and sections of her right arm and right leg eaten.  Soon, the real horror starts when the cannibals start listening to Ace of Base!  Arlen can't take it anymore and escapes.  She eventually shows up in a town full of tweakers and dorks called Comfort.  From there on, more things happen, but honestly...I didn't give a shit.  The story was dumb as fuck, slow-moving and illogical.

The only thing I knew about TBB going into it was it was about cannibals and it starred Keanu Reeves.  That sounds awesome!  In my handsome brain, I was visualizing BILL & TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE versus CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST.   That didn't happen.

Style over substance storytelling, very little dialogue, lots of music video-style photography, Jim Carrey showing up from some unknown reason, snail's pace, multiple things that brought to mind EL TOPO, zero nudity, very little violence, promising opening act, weak middle act and a lame as fuck ending.

If you need me, I'll be in my room playing Borderlands.