June 9, 2000 | At once dizzyingly chaotic and dismally lackluster, Gone in 60 Seconds is a slam-bang blur of flashy technique and flaunty attitude that goes nowhere fast. Despite the insistent efforts of director Dominic Sena (Kalifornia) to intensify each scene with rapid-fire editing, near-surreal color schemes and a wall-to-wall, rave-all-night pop-rock soundtrack, this latest eruption of sound and fury engineered by producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Armageddon) spends far too much time spinning its wheels. It’s almost as though, after expending all their energy on the stuff showcased in the action-packed, attention-grabbing coming-attractions trailer, Sena and his actors simply were too exhausted, mentally and physically, to do anything but go through the motions while completing the picture.
Even Nicolas Cage, an actor notorious for his ability to hotwire a routine action flick and zip into subversive, self-satirical excess, seems subdued, if not downright bored. Except for a few flashes of his trademark ersatz-Elvis swagger, and a fleeting imposture of a flamboyantly fussy customer in a Porsche dealership, Cage’s performance registers as the work of a gifted but indolent actor on automatic pilot.
Cage stars as Randall “Memphis” Raines,” an L.A. car thief so boldly efficient that, when he retired, Southern California posted a 47 percent drop in reports of auto theft. Memphis became a model citizen – the operator of a go-kart track, no less – at the urging of his long-suffering mother (Grace Zabriskie), who feared that Memphis’ younger brother, Kip (the ineffably creepy Giovanni Ribisi), might follow in his footsteps. Six years later, however, Kip has gone ahead and launched a criminal career anyway.
Unfortunately, Kip isn’t a very good car thief. Even more unfortunately, he botches an assignment for a most unforgiving client: Raymond Calitri (Christopher Eccleston of Elizabeth), a malevolent piece of Eurotrash who rashly assumed Kip could steal 50 collector-worthy cars within a tight time frame. Calitri plans to toss Kip’s own car into an auto compactor — while Kip remains handcuffed to the steering wheel – unless Memphis comes out of retirement to snatch the 50 vehicles within an even tighter time frame. Like, three days.
Memphis devotes the better part of 72 hours to locating and recruiting former partners in crime. First, he enlists the aid of ex-mentor Otto Halliwell (Robert Duvall), a former chop-shop master gone semi-legit. Then, to give the movie at least some semblance of a romantic subplot, Memphis calls upon Sara “Sway” Wayland (Angelina Jolie), his one-time accomplice and sometime girlfriend, who poses a provocative question: What’s more of a turn-on, boosting cars or making love? Such is Memphis’ dedication to his craft that he must seriously ponder the alternatives before responding.
After gathering a few more co-conspirators – including a hulking mute played by ex-footballer Vinnie Jones of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – Memphis gets down to the business of planning and launching a dusk-to-dawn marathon of auto thievery. Trouble is, nothing terribly interesting happens during all this preparation. A troublesome cop (Delroy Lindo, picking up an easy paycheck) drops by to ask pointed questions, a rival car thief makes some noise about protecting his turf, and that’s about it. The audience is led to expect a pay-off of shoot-the-moon excitement after so much repetitious exposition. But the movie stints on pulse-pounding spectacle, and provides only the unsatisfying catharsis of a climax that has Memphis racing a stolen 1967 Shelby Mustang while pursued by cop cars and a helicopter.
The singular lack of cheap thrills is all the more surprising when you consider Gone in 60 Seconds is a big-budget, star-studded retread of a no-budget, high-concept 1974 drive-in quickie that attained cult status by wrecking 90 cars in a 40-minute chase scene. For reasons not entirely clear, the makers of the remake have tried to cobble together a more character-driven movie, which is always a big mistake when you’re dealing with such low-mileage dramatis personae. Indeed, the characters in Scott Rosenberg’s screenplay are so thin, they are defined almost entirely by the actors portraying them.
Duvall is such a sly old pro that, even with a minimum of dialogue, he’s able to convince you that he’s playing a human being, not a plot device. Better still, he manages to develop a believable on-screen rapport with Cage. Maybe, when the cameras weren’t running, these two guys bonded by swapping stories about slumming for fun and profit after earning an Oscar as Best Actor.
Jolie, another Academy Award winner, wears garish dreadlocks to convey her character’s eccentricity. Even so, that’s not enough to make her performance at all memorable. To be fair, though, she doesn’t have much screen time to make much of an impression. She inexplicably disappears for long periods throughout Gone in 60 Sixty Seconds. And whenever she does return, you half-expect Cage or some other actor to stop what he’s doing and say something like, “Excuse me, but do I know… Oh, yeah, now I remember. You’re in this picture, too.”
