Gone in 60 Seconds: Blu-ray disc DVD Review

(Originally published June 9, 2000)

Apparently, it takes just 60 seconds to lose your credibility, to damage your career, to become a laughingstock, to disappoint your audience, and to forever alter the way the world views you, your work and your choices.

Such is the case for the Academy Award-winning cast of Dominic Sena’s “Gone in 60 Seconds,” a film about car chases and caricatures that stars Nicolas Cage and Angelina Jolie, two actors who should have known better than to turn their Academy Awards into big pots of worthless fools gold.

This is Jolie’s first movie since scoring a Best Supporting Actress award at this year’s Academy Awards, and she’s just bad enough to make it seem as if her winning turn in “Girl, Interrupted” was nothing but a fluke.

She’s in good company. After Cage’s Best Actor win for “Leaving Las Vegas,” his career has been so entirely unremarkable in his rampant pursuit of money, whatever talent he may have exhibited in strong, smaller films such as “Vegas,” “Moonstruck” and “Raising Arizona” has since been sucked into an artistic vacuum.

Jolie does fair better than Cage in “Gone,” but that’s only because she wasn’t asked to speak as much of the film’s pseudo-tough and often hilarious dialogue, which is as painful to listen to as any live performance by Mariah Carey. Instead, Jolie was apparently hauled in to showcase her enormous lips, which are so startlingly full and menacing in their plumped up bravada, they look as if they could dismantle a tractor.

Based on H. B. Halicki’s 1974 drive-in movie of the same name, “Gone in 60 Seconds” features Cage as Memphis Raines, a retired car thief who jumps back into a life of crime after his younger brother, Kip (Giovanni Ribisi), fails to deliver 50 high-priced stolen cars to the mobster Raymond Calitri (Christopher Eccleston).

Now, with Kip’s life on the line, it’s up to Memphis and his tag team of STP-sniffing troglodytes (Robert Duvall, Jolie, Will Patton, Chi McBride and Vinnie Jones) to evade the police and get those cars to Calitri in four days flat.

With the exception of the film’s car chases, which are well done, everything here looks as if it took 60 seconds to slap together: the plot, the performances, Cage’s toupee, the dialogue.

In fact, not enough can be said about the film’s dialogue, which is so bad, it’s like finding stains on a mattress--you just want to cover it up in embarrassment.

Grade: D