"Gone in 60 Seconds" Thankfully Took Longer Than That to Get Gone.

Could Angelina Jolie Look Any More Stoned?

This review is loooong overdue. I watched this movie ages ago, but life caught up with me and I just haven't had time to sit down and do it. So, as punishment, now I have to write up THREE REVIEWS this week. That means three times the fun, three times the excitement, three times the groans of absolute disgust. Well...not necessarily. If the other two movies that I review are anything like this one, I think that we might all get out of this alive, after all.

This...is Gone in 60 Seconds.

Cage plays Randall Raines, a retired master car thief, who has to return to Los Angeles and steal 50 cars in 3 days for British crime boss Raymond Calitri. That's pretty much the whole movie. Calitri has some freakish obsession with furniture which later proves to be his one weakness, and Cage doesn't even show up until like...10 minutes into the movie. Anything and everything is better than fucking G-Force, though.

So British McKitchenChairs is threatening to kill Cage's younger brother, Kip a.k.a. "The Douchebag of this Movie Who Will Later Have an Epiphany About What a Dick He Is" , in his car compactor at some bigass metal junkyard, after Kip and his associates don't make the deadline to deliver some stolen cars at the beginning of the movie, thanks to Kip being a huge tool and drag racing in a stolen vehicle/attracting the attention of the police, who raid the warehouse where Kip's team was collecting the cars and impound all of the cars. All of them. Cage makes a deal with Amish Horse'n'Buggy McGinty that he'll steal 50 cars for him by I guess it's a Friday to save his brother's life, and in order to do this, Cage reassembles his old team of badass car thieves which include an old dude who works as a repairman I guess, Angelina Jolie with the worst hair ever, and some tall badass motherfucker who doesn't talk. Some of Kip's stupid friends also join the crew.

Roland Castlebeck, the baddest cop ever, and his partner (whose name is unimportant, and honestly who I thought had a crush on Castlebeck for like 15 minutes of the movie) are the two cops who are trying to catch Cage in the act, remembering what a badass car thief he was back in the day. They're actually pretty good cops and they almost catch the gang at several points in the heist, which takes place all in one night in order to keep suspicion to a minimum.

Castlebeck uses some Saw-style forensics to find Kip's list of cars from his crew's failed night of thieving, and he predicts that Cage will save the 1967 Shelby Mustang GT 500 for last because Cage has unsuccessfully tried to steal that same car numerous times and he refers to it as his "unicorn". He's right, of course, and this leads to a FUCKING AWESOME CHASE SCENE which I think should just be edited into every Cage movie ever to increase the badassery by 20%, even if it's completely irrelevant. Hell, G-Force might have actually been watchable if this chase scene were in it. That's how awesome the chase is. Seriously, even if you don't want to watch this movie, watch the chase scene. Do it.
 
Cage shows up late to drop off the last car, and Don Pip-Pip Cheerio basically looks at it and says "this is a piece of shit, I'm going to kill you instead of your brother, so there lol". Kip shows up after having his epiphany about what a huge douche he is to save Cage, and Cage, Castlebeck, and Harry Potter have an on-foot chase scene through the warehouse or whatever that ends with Calitri falling to his death in a really hilariously bad show of special effects. In an act of gratitude for saving his life, and understanding his motive for returning to car thievery for one night only to save his brother's life, Castlebeck lets Cage out the cage before the other police arrive to arrest his ass.

What the hell even is there to say about this movie? This movie is about two things: cars, and Nicolas Cage. I say cars first because the cars are definitely the star of this movie. If you love cars, you will love this movie. If you love Cage, you will also love this movie. If you love Cage in cars, you will lose your shit over this movie. Nicolas Cage needs to be in a high-speed police chase in every single movie that he's in, period. This movie was fun to watch, especially since it was on ABC Family for some reason? So all of the swearing was bleeped out hilariously. Why the hell was this on ABC Family? This is about people committing multiple felonies, and there is so much shooting and GETTING SHOT and sex and drugs in this movie...

You know what, I'm not even going to ask. Good job Cage, this movie gets 4 1967 Shelby Mustang GT 500's out of 5. Fun to watch, even with Angie Jolie's ugly-ass hair all up in my face for an hour and a half.

I Knew "G-Force" Might Kill Me, but Never in This Way.

I need a bigger barf bag.

I was scheduled to watch The Family Man this week, but time betrayed me and now it's Saturday. In all honesty, I haven't watched it yet. It's sitting collecting dust on my hard drive at the moment, but it will be watched. I assure you. Wild at Heart and Gone in 60 Seconds are both sitting half-watched on my TiVo downstairs: I know, I know, I'm betraying my code of watching-then-reviewing. But there's a reason for that. Because the abomination that I'm reviewing this week instead of The Family Man is nothing like those (so far enjoyable) pieces of cinematic mastery. I'm in fact dreading doing this review almost as much as I dreaded watching the movie itself, because writing it means re-living the godawful, nothing-but-torturous experience that exposing my eyes and ears to this pile of feces was.

Brace yourself.

This...is G-Force.

If you lived through that, let's get started. I'll try my very best to make this quick and painless.

G-Force is about talking guinea pigs. There's no nicer way to say that. They have some kind of advanced earpiece (not explained) that Zach Galifinakis' character made (God damn you, Zach Galifinakis) and they are also apparently "specially-bred and genetically enhanced". There are three of them (later four): Darwin, the white one, Juarez, the Hispanic one, and Blaster, the black one. The most important character is Speckles the mole, voiced by your favorite and mine, Nicolas Cage.

Let's plow through this "plot". The Wikipedia article for this movie has a plot section that's about five paragraphs long. At the top of the section is the annotation that "the plot section is too detailed/long and needs to be more concise". Really, I think that they just wanted it to be shorter so that fewer people would blow their brains out trying to read about this movie, if for some reason they had to. Some God-forsaken reason. I pity the fool. And myself.

Basically, these multicultural guinea pigs are "superspies" that work for Zach G and his weird girlfriend in some laboratory, and they go on an unauthorized mission to get data on some billionaire who's supposedly installing evil computer chips in all of the appliances that his company makes. The FBI shuts them down and the guinea pigs and Speckles end up in a pet store, and meet another guinea pig named Hurley. Speckles fakes his death and gets thrown into the garbage. The guinea pigs get taken home by weird children, escape, and make their way back to Zach G.

Zach's like "lol you're not special/genetically-altered", the guinea pigs baww, Hurley's like "LOL NAW YOU GUYS ROCK", they get psyched, nobody gives a shit except for the guinea pigs and Zach, because seriously...what the fuck is this movie, I couldn't even deal with this shit half of the time. It's so overloaded with shitty pop-culture references and just FULL TO BURSTING with Black Eyed Peas music for some reason...and oh my god, Disney, you need to learn when toilet humor is actually funny. Fart jokes are funny when they're subtle and well-executed, not when you have guinea pigs lighting each others' farts on fire in a pet store and shit like that. Toilet humor is an art. An art that Disney fails to grasp. And it's painful.

Let me pause for a moment here to say that within the first six minutes of this movie, I wanted to kill myself ten times. This movie is eighty-eight minutes long. That means that, by that standard, I wanted to kill myself about a hundred and forty-seven times throughout the movie's run. Though believe me, it was well into the two hundred range.

You know what? I'm not even going to finish talking about the plot of this movie, because it's just not even worth talking about. You want to know what happens at the end? Everyone lives and the villain gets his comeuppance. It's a Disney movie. That's what happens. All the $150 million CGI couldn't cover up the shitty plot and the shitty jokes and the shitty music choices that tried to make this movie "hip" and "cool for the whole family". If I were a parent and my child wanted to see this movie, I would tell them that no, no they did not. And then we would watch Babe. Because if you want to watch a movie where animals talk, you should at least watch one that's fucking good.

You could probably play a drinking game while you're watching this movie. I would call it the "Disney Blacksploitation Drinking Game", because the black guinea pig is treated like shit throughout the entire movie/is pegged as the stupidest character/consistently fits the black stereotype. You would be drunk off your ass by about the 25-minute mark. Take a shot every time Blaster says something stupid, or something stereotypically black. Good luck being alive in the morning.

And now, let me raise another fine question, here: why the HELL are these guinea pigs different ethnicities?! I mean I get that they wanted to have a star-studded voice cast, but oh my fucking god, there is just something so goddamn grating about that. When animals are voiced by POC, and you can tell that they're supposed to represent that ethnicity. You have to stereotype to do that, and it's just disturbing. Why is this allowed to happen? Why is this okay for kids to watch? Aren't we supposed to be teaching children about equality? How is this helping that?!

Don't watch this movie. Just don't. There is no reason to watch it. Not if you like Nic Cage, not if you like Zach Galifinakis, not if you like the Black Eyed Peas...well, I guess if you like racial stereotyping, you can watch it, but fucking seriously. Seriously, Disney? This is atrocious. Every few years, Disney just puts something out that makes me want to vomit, and this is one of those movies. I hate myself a little more for sitting through this piece of bullshit. I can't believe that this grossed as much as it did. God damn stupid kids. Please, parents. Please. Make your children watch Babe or Homeward Bound. Just...please. For the sake of the future.

I am sickened by this movie. Not even Nicolas Cage could make this better. Zero out of five hamster pellets. Rot in hell, G-Force. Rot in guinea pig HELL.

Nicolas Cage Wants Cake. But Who Doesn't?

In anticipation of watching The Family Man next week, here's a video that I'm sure everyone has already seen, but that never really seems to get old.

Nicolas Cage fans will always be some of the most eccentric people on the face of the earth.