Gone in Sixty Seconds (2000)

The Reason For 3 Stars
The only reason I am giving this 3 stars instead of 4 is because of a rather long drawn out "scene" in this movie that completely spoiled it for me. If they had left that part out, it would have been awesome! Great cars, good plot...guess you can't have everything...

Gone in Sixty Seconds
Kip Raines is the younger brother of Randall "Memphis" Raines, a now retired professional car thief.
Kip was contracted to steal 50 exotic cars all over Los Angeles and Long Beach but something went wrong. Now the man who hired him, Raymond Calitri (a Russian mobster and stolen car broker), wants his head.
When Memphis learns of this, he comes back to town to see if he can help his brother. The only thing that will appease Calitri is if the order is fulfilled. Memphis must deliver the cars to Long Beach Harbor, Pier 14 by 8:00am, Friday morning, on the button, or watch Calitri kill Kip.
So Memphis has to assemble his old crew, and do the job in a few days. Meanwhile a cop, who hounded him upon learning of his return, is keeping an close eye on him.
Can the team pull this assignment off and deliver the cars in time? Will Kip finally realize that car boosting is dangerous? And can Memphis escape the cops?

Nuclear waste for the MTV Babies
First off, I found the "director's cut" thing mildly amusing. Now I can see this gem just as the director envisioned it. I'm also keeping an eye out for director's cut releases of Revenge of the Nerds and Weekend at Bernie's II.

I know this is not a movie you're supposed to take seriously (yet the "director's cut" thing does seem to suggest otherwise)- we're all in the mood for some cheap entertainment now and again. However, I do believe watching this movie too many times could very well cause some sort of degenerative disease of the brain. Then again, the act of seeking out this movie (especially the director's cut) for the sake of viewing again (and again - the horror!) would suggest that such a disease has already reached an advanced stage.

This does make sense, since this movie strikes me as one which would appeal to the same shaggy-headed humanoids that stare at the first sign of the apocolypse we know as MTV. This channel makes the brain rot faster than nuclear waste, so a couple years of it would have a viewer pretty well primed for the movie.

It's no secret Nicholas Cage wouldn't chose a role in a good movie if his life depended on it. This one, however, is brutal. I conjure up an image of his diginity personified. It's sitting naked on the edge of a bed littered with various tools of self-mutilation, reeking of booze and covered with cigarette burns. It grimaces as it puts another cigarette out on its shoulder and turns another page in the script. The grimace was not from the cigarette.

There's no shortage of stupid, hokey scenes chalk full of horrid lines in this movie. The numerous attempts to capture "cool" and "hip" I'd liken to a Dustin Diamond interpretation of Hannibal Lector. The scene in which Cage plays "Lowrider" on the boombox is perhaps one of the hardest to watch in the history of film. Duval must have been crying in his trailor after doing that one. I do like Duval. I want so badly to believe there was some sort of contractual obligation involved.

Well, this movie already ripped an hour and a half of my life away - the residual effects I have still to endure(nightmares in which Cage repeatedly tells Master P "aaaight?"). So why am I punishing myself further by forcing all the unsettling imagery and sound back into my conscious stream? I must not waste any more of my life than I already have on this movie.

I will conclude by saying if all you want to do is watch car chase scenes, there's a ton of great films other than this one to choose from. Then again, you could just watch COPS, and you'd probably see some better acting in the process.