Cage, Unleashed: Drive Angry - Official Trailer [HD]

Okay, so maybe we're suckers for punishment: Nicholas cage keeps appearing in movies, we keep watching them (and  labouring to review them).

Let me state in my defense however that Drive Angry actually represents an improvement on Cage's prolonged wretched run. Sure, it has the pornographic violence, the mindless dialogue and the late-night-cable type sex scenes that we've deplored elsewhere.

But.....

there's a difference. Firstly, in Cage himself. he still has crappy lines, but he's noticeably not phoning them in the way he did in his previous outings. And director Patrick Lussier, having made his name, with the "Scream" franchise takes a "slash-and burn" approach to the filming itself, combining dizzying action scenes with lurid slo-mo with the glee of a kid mastering his first Super 8. Indeed, so much of the movie has a "WTF - let's go for it!" that I'm tempted to ask the question: "Has Nick Cage finally bottomed out?"

Some of the credit for that openness must go to the inspired casting of William Fichtner. Billed throughout the film only as 'The Accountant' he not only totally overshadows the film's other villain, a murderous Satanic cult leader played by Billy Burke, Fichtner actually makes one believe it is possible to look GQ-cool while driving the shaft of a baseball bat through a man's shoulder blade, or sitting in a car that has flipped over three times after falling forty feet off a bridge.

Yes, folks, these are just a sampling of the excesses that you will have to contend with in Drive Angry. Oh yes, how could we forget - there's Amber Heard, as Cage's unwitting sidekick in his pursuit of revenge. The role calls for feistiness and flashes of thigh and Miss Heard is up to the stern challenge.

He has a loooong way yet to go, but  Nicholas Cage may yet be on the road to redemption. Watch it - if you can - and see what I mean.

Nicholas Cage needs a "Refresh" button: 'Season of the Witch' Trailer HD

So, until the inevitable Scorcerer's Apprentice sequel, audiences are thrown this tired bag of bones to chew on (and the Scorcerer's Apprentice was hardly a worthwhile meal in the first place).

This time around, modern-day NYC has been forsaken, its back to medieval Europe, in the grip of the plague while many, many leagues east, knights hack the 'infidels' to death under the urging of chain mail-wearing priests. Scorcerers and zealots good; witches, bad.

At tleast that's the comparison that's being begged by this set-up. Cage here is one of the aforesaid knights, renowned for his battlefield skills and valor, but disgusted by the killing and distrustful of his masters' religious zealotry.

He, along with his compadre (well played by Hellboy's Ron Perlman) choose to desert the Crusading army, and spend days wandering through death and desolation before alighting upon a town, decimated by the plague. Here, they are "unexpectedly" pressed back into serving the church, this time to deliver an accused witch (Claire Foy, from "Little Dorritt") for "trial" at some far-off monastery, accompanied by a priest (Stephen Campbel Moore) an aspiring knight, a wily salesman (read "con") and a town elder who has lost his entire family to the contagion.

All the visual bells and whistles are there, particularly in the cliamactic scene when things get really ugly, and  director Dominic Sena (who previously worked with Cage in Gone In Sixty Seconds) clearly knows how to get maximum mileage from the assigned talent.

The problem is Cage himself. All the promise of Rumblefish and Birdy and Racing with the Moon and Raising Arizona has just been thrown out the window and then trampled on. It appears, especially since the blockbuster success of National Treasure, that Cage is content to shoulder a kind of "occult-lite" formula, bringing little to these films other than his mere presence, which I guess in itself accounts for bang atte box office.

 This writer certainly wasn't expecting him to stay in the same quirky mode of his earlier work for his whole career, but this is worse: big-name schlock done purely for expected profit. Whatever the current state of his finances (reports abound of money disputes and impending bankruptcy), its sad to see good talent squandered in this way. he needs a "Refresh" and soon.

But, with the Ghost Rider sequel filming as we speak, creative renewals will just have to wait