#024 - Gone in 60 Seconds (2000)
Hello and welcome to my weblog. This afternoon I watched Gone in 60 Seconds (2000).
There are three reasons, I think, why so many people my age have such an affinity towards Nicholas Cage. The first is that he was a star of our youth and the second is that his performances are ridiculous. The third is that he went into the Great Recession basically unemployable and up to his ears in debt which is incredibly relatable to a lot of people graduating from college around that time. I’m not sure why the phone stopped ringing for Nic but I think part of it was that he was too baroque, too much ornament, too much too much at a time of austerity, in a crisis of excess. So he ended up pivoting from quality to quantity; he did more movies each year with diminishing production values and presumably diminishing paychecks. In a span of less than 4 years in the late 2010s, he acted in more movies than he did in all of the 1990s and other than Mandy, I doubt you would have heard of any of them because I certainly hadn’t until I started this project. These films were basically all straight-to-DVD and then later straight-to-streaming. And so the streaming services, or at least the ones I have login credentials for, are full of these later movies and largely devoid of his earlier work. I think my tone in this series has been largely negative so far and that has been because I have been responding to his worst work because that is the easiest to find online.
So yesterday I went to a used video store out in the suburbs and bought every pre-recession Nic Cage movie I could find on DVD. If the cashier who rang up all thirteen DVDs realized the connection between all of the films, he didn’t say anything. I’m excited to have some better movies to write to you about. Movies like this one.
In the pantheon of Nic Cage / Jerry Bruckheimer movies, Gone in 60 Seconds is not the first one you’d think of and it’s probably not the second, but damn what a big, dumb movie. It was a fun ensemble heist movie a year before Ocean’s Eleven and it was a crime movie about family and cars with a big cookout scene at the end a year before the Fast and the Furious so it is wild to me that it was a one-off, that it didn’t become a franchise like those other films.
Nic Cage plays Memphis Raines, a retired car thief who comes back to L.A. to save his younger brother from an Arts and Crafts furniture enthusiast who also does murders. He has three days to steal fifty cars including several Ferraris, Porches, and a Volvo station wagon. He recruits all of his old car thief buddies, or all those who are still alive and out of prison, as well as his younger brother’s crew and they attempt to steal all 50 cars in one night, despite the fact that the detectives in the grand theft auto division have a pretty good idea what they’re up to. The final car on the list is a Shelby Mustang, a car that Memphis was never able to steal successfully and which has always haunted him. One character confides in another that Memphis is saving that car for last because he’s afraid of it. If there are two things that people in Los Angeles know about Memphis Raines, it’s that he’s the best car thief there ever was and that the Shelby Mustang is the one car he could never catch. Detectives, other thieves, everybody knows the nickname he’s given this car. The police are immediately on him once he steals it and they chase him through the city including a scene in the L.A. river where he outruns a helicopter and another on a bridge where he uses a flatbed tow truck as a ramp to jump over a car crash, including the responding firetruck and ambulance.
When he delivers the final car, the Mustang, battered from the chase throughout the city, the furniture villain’s henchmen tell Memphis that he’s late and that they won’t accept the car. In what is the most poignant scene in the movie, we see the Mustang sent to be crushed into scrap metal and we realize that the love interest in this movie isn’t Sway, played by Angelina Jolie, but Eleanor which is the name he gives the car.
This is a movie about family, about brothers and their bond, but also it is about how Nic Cage wants to fuck the car.
P.S. Thank you to everyone who wrote in to tell me to find a rosemary plant to leave at this house I’m renting. I finally found one at the hardware store yesterday and planted it last evening.