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)

RAMPAGE (1987)

“The women’s bodies were cut open to get at the organs.”

Charles Reece (Alex McArthur) is a murderous, blood-sucking freak who walks around town blasting innocent people with an unsilenced handgun before sexual assaulting and disemboweling their corpses. He also likes to drink the blood of the dead to replace his own poisoned blood (cuz that’s how that works). Anthony Fraser (Michael Biehn) is a liberal-minded prosecutor who decides to go for the death penalty with Reece’s case.

Originally filmed in 1987, but not released theatrically until 1992, although I did locate a film festival in September 1987 where it played twice (see clippings below), William Friedkin’s RAMPAGE is a mess. The basic story, a fictionalized retelling of the crimes of Richard Chase, is mildly entertaining, but once he gets arrested (way too early in the film) things just bog down, down, down until you can feel your own poisoned blood coagulating in your cursed arteries.

Up and down pace, super impressive cast, way less violence than you would probably expect, a wicked shot of Reece fantasizing about bathing in blood while sitting in a tiger enclosure (I swear on Fred Durst’s grave that when I saw this film back in the 1990’s, the camera shot was wider and you could see three tigers), solid acting, the single darkest courtroom in movie history, a little blood, zero gore, zero nudity, a real hatred for expert witnesses, multiple interesting scenes that were cut short while other (less imaginative) scenes were left in.

I’m not sure which version of this film I originally saw back in the day and I’m not even sure that it matters. Watching RAMPAGE in 2025 is going to be disappointing for (I would think) everybody. There is just such a vast amount of superior serial killer and crime genre stuff out there nowadays. For example, I recently watched the show Dept. Q (Season 1) in two sittings and time just flew by! I couldn't get enough. Then I sit down today to revisit RAMPAGE and while I was fascinated by the cast, the story (especially the courtroom stuff) was dead on arrival.

I'm sure there's Friedkin freaks out there that absolutely love this movie, but it's just not my cup of non-poisoned blood anymore. I do remember liking it when it first came out, but it has not aged well. That said, if they ever come out with a definitive, remastered version of RAMPAGE, I would watch it.