The Travolta/Cage Project #58 Gone in 60 Seconds (2000)
Over the course of this project I have repeatedly found myself enjoying the holy living fuck out of movies I didn’t like at the time of their release and/or gave negative reviews when I was a film critic for The A.V Club.
There are a couple of reasons for this. I am a big believer in the idea that the more you put into something, the more you get out of it. Heck, much of my career has been dedicated to that principle. I have spent YEARS, for example, immersing myself in the music and world of “Weird Al” Yankovic, for this website and a series of books, and I consequently get something special and rare and important out of every song he’s ever released, up to and including “She Never Told Me She Was a Mime” and “Party at the Leper Colony.”
On a related note, when you commit yourself to watching and re-watching and writing about and discussing EVERY single movie Nicolas Cage has made over the course of his extraordinary, four decade long career in film you get a whole lot more out of every thing he’s done, no matter how minor or misguided.
I went into this project a huge Nicolas Cage fan. Now he’s pretty much my favorite actor and someone whose work I feel an intense emotional connection to. Another reason I have repeatedly found myself digging movies that left me cold the first time around is because I am a deeply nostalgic soul. So part of what I love about a movie like 2000’s Gone in 60 Seconds is how perfectly it embodies the gloriously ridiculous era that birthed it.
I have an incredible fondness for American pop culture at the turn of the millennium, that goofy, loopy, ridiculous time just before the attacks of 9/11 seemed to make our world infinitely more somber and serious overnight.
I’ve also learned to appreciate what Nicolas Cage brings to Jerry Bruckheimer blockbusters. In Gone in 60 Seconds, as in The Rock and Con Air, Cage invests a deliriously over the top comic book spectacle with a core of heart and genuine emotion as well as a spark of overlapping genius and madness.
Gone in 60 Seconds smartly casts a seldom-cooler Cage as one of the method actor’s intense true believers/artists. He’s Randall "Memphis" Raines, a legendary car thief, the best in the game, but he gave it all up to try to keep his no-good younger brother Kip (Giovanni Ribisi) from going down a bad road and to work with children in a heartwarming capacity.
The reformed car thief’s love interest in Sara "Sway" Wayland (Angelina Jolie), a sex bomb wild child fellow car thief but even a twenty-five year old Jolie can’t compete with automobiles for Memphis’ heart, most notably a 1967 Mustang named Eleanor that is his one true love.
Memphis loves cars so much that I would not be surprised if he’s had sex with particularly gorgeous and seductive automobiles as well as in them, Crash-style. Memphis is a Boy Scout with a heart of gold and a love for family to rival that of Dominic Toretto but it would not surprise me to learn that his penis has been inside a tailpipe or two. I’m not trying to kink-shame anyone; he just strikes me as a potential/possible car-fucker.
The screenplay for Gone in 60 Seconds does not challenge Cage as an actor like Paul Schrader’s script for Gone in 60 Seconds but he has a lovely little monologue where he gushes in near sexual terms about the boner-inducing ecstasy of finding a truly beautiful car, having your way with it, then moving on and how the purity of the hunt was eventually compromised by the regrettable reality that stealing cars is, from a legal standpoint at least, against the law, and can get you imprisoned or killed. Also, the people whose cars you’re stealing really don’t like it.
Being a great guy as well as a world-class thief, Memphis chooses the straight life but is sucked irrevocably back into a seedy world of criminality and car thievery when he’s forced to steal fifty high end cars in a matter of mere days in order to save his brother from being killed by ruthless crime boss Raymond Calitri (Christopher Eccleston).
Not even a dynamo like Memphis can steal that many cars in such a small amount of time all by himself so he goes about putting together a crew of colorful crooks that includes old-timer Otto Halliwell (Robert Duvall), sexy ex-girlfriend Sara "Sway" Wayland (Angelina Jolie, in the thankless, conspicuously younger love interest role), wisecracking driving instructor Donny Astricky (Chi McBride, Desmond Pfeiffer of The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer), wisecracking Mirror Man (T.J Cross) and The Sphinx (Vinnie Jones), a towering brute who never talks.
Because Gone in 60 Seconds is a very silly and very excessive movie, they then throw in a second squad of colorful crooks with flamboyant personalities and unusual areas of expertise, this time from Kip’s crew, in order to form a super-squad of world-class car thieves working around the clock to save some loser’s life.
Scott Rosenberg, who also co-wrote Con Air, piles on the goofy eccentricities, like having Calitri be a dedicated woodworker. When he’s not killing people or threatening their families he’s putting together chairs and tables and a coffin for Kip should his brother fail his impossible mission.
In his quest to steal some of the sexiest, hottest, most alluring cars in all of Los Angeles Memphis and his crew end up going up against Detective Roland Castlebeck (the always great Delroy Lindo) Detective Drycoff (Timothy Olyphant) and a rival criminal played by rap mogul Master P.
Lindo and Olyphant have terrific chemistry. There’s a great little moment where Olyphant’s young buck alludes to his partner’s wife being mean and while it initially appears to be well-worn shtick between the two men Lindo shoots him a harsh look that silently but indelibly establishes that they most assuredly do not have the kind of relationship where his partner can say unkind things about his wife without major repercussions.
The presence of Scott Caan in a supporting role as a member of Kip’s crew highlights Gone in 60 Seconds’ resemblance to Ocean’s Eleven, which Caan would co-star in a year later. Gone in 60 Seconds also shares an awful lot with another hit from the following year, The Fast and the Furious.
Don’t even pretend that you know anything about 1990s alt-rock if you’re not familiar with this band.
Gone in 60 Seconds is fun the same way the Ocean’s Eleven trilogy and the better Fast and the Furious sequels are fun. It’s a featherweight, escapist action-comedy filled with great character actors playing kooky crooks with crazy names and offbeat specialties.
How can you not have at least a guilty fondness for a movie where characters named Mirror Man and The Sphinx try to steal a car and avoid the giant venomous snake in the back seat to the accompaniment of Saint DMX’s all-time banger “Party Up?”
Gone in 60 Seconds is the single most 2000 movie in existence. That’s a big part of what I love about it but I also love that it is a one hundred million dollar b-movie with a leading man who adds a whole lot of soul to what otherwise could easily have been an empty spectacle.
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