Gone in 60 Seconds

When you attend a Jerry Bruckheimer film which is released in a month whose name begins with "J," like "Gone in 60 Seconds," you expect certain things to be absent: plausibility, subtlety, intricacy, coherency, intelligence. Those qualities aren't here either, and they are not much missed; this is summer, after all, and no one really wants to watch "Time Code 2" when the weather is warm and the living is easy. "Gone in 60 Seconds"'s problem is not that it is fast, loud and moronic but that it is not fast, loud and moronic enough. While most of its actors turn in good performances, and there are certainly some transient moments of unabashed glee, ultimately this movie's failure to throw itself headlong into the pleasures of summer should have you going to some other movie.

Positive stuff first. The cast is ridiculously good, at least twice as good as the movie needs it to be. Which is part of the problem. But there is much pleasure to be gained from, for example, the shifty-eyed yet steely determination of Nicolas Cage as our hero, the easy and commanding Delroy Lindo as our good bad guy (he's a cop, but he loves cars as much as our hero), or the sheer sex-bombitude of Angelina Jolie as our obligatory love interest. (This list leaves out the gruff benevolence of Robert Duvall, which is okay because the movie basically does too.) Of the principals, in fact, only Giovanni Ribisi falls short of consistent excellence; one cannot really fathom why Cage is willing to throw it all away on the off chance that he can save cipheresque Ribisi's life. But then, making Cage's actions plausible would involve establishing motivation, and we don't care about that.

With a movie like this, on the contrary, we pretty much only care about car chases that are hopefully hellacious, a soundtrack that hopefully rocks harder than an avalanche, men staring each other down in what we expect to be an intimidating way, and semi-pornographic shots of classic cars. Count the soundtrack as the only unqualified success here. Only one car chase sprawls destructively across the landscape; while it does involve some adrenaline-pumping driving from our man Cage, it is but one chase in an otherwise arid sea, and it cannot match or approach such classics of the genre as Gene Hackman's subway chase in "The French Connection" or Robert DeNiro's backwards jaunt through French tunnels in "Ronin." Scenes wherein Lindo and Cage verbally joust with each other feel oddly abbreviated and rushed, and Cage's encounters with the main bad guy are sapped of their tension because said bad guy is a total lackwit.

Furthermore, in a film about stealing cars, why are there not more shots of the classic automobiles themselves? Why not lavish attention on their pulchritudinous curves, their unblinking stances, the undeniable sex appeal they exude from every C joint and buffed sheetmetal panel? Director Dominic Sena apparently could not find time for more shots like the brief yet tantalizing glimpse of a metallic-purple Lamborghini Diablo that elicited such a palpable gasp from the preview audience. Is this too much to ask for? One loving glide over the rambunctious undulations of a Ferrari, the brute forthrightness of the Humvee, the Teutonic sleekness of a Porsche?

And so we arrive at the central problem of "Gone in 60 Seconds": director Sena has a feel for visuals and kinetics and James Bond gadgetry, but he absolutely cannot manage his time. He dallies with the actors and not nearly enough time with what they signed up to do in this movie, i.e., look cool and drive fast and blow things up. Setting up the overnight heist, which is the only point this film has, takes up entirely too much time. Once the heist is in action, Sena feels a need to check in with every single member of the large, talented cast, to the detriment of cool things actually happening. Perhaps they should have thrown a few dud unknowns into the casting call so Sena would not have felt guilty about providing filmgoers with what they really want. "Gone in 60 Seconds" is far from a bad action film, with its meaty buffet of actors and occasional action wizardry, but fans of big manly vehicles moving about in thrilling ways would be better served by seeing "U-571" again.

I realize that the thing about "months beginning with J" doesn't work because of January. All I can say is that I was taking as much trouble with the review as Dominic Sena took with the movie.

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