3D Blu-ray Movie Reviews

In the high-octane, action-adventure "Drive Angry", Nicolas Cage stars as an undead felon who breaks out of hell to avenge his murdered daughter and rescue her kidnapped baby from a band of cult-worshipping savages. Joined by tough-as-nails Piper, the two set off on a rampage of redemption, all while being pursued by an enigmatic killer who has been sent by the Devil to retrieve Milton and deliver him back to hell.

The 3D presentation is good as this film was shot with 3D in mind and was done with a 3D camera rig as opposed to a postproduction effect. Depth of image is fantastic and they put plenty of flying at you out of the screen effects in. While this comes off cheesy at times, that was the intent. With my JVC setup I noticed quite a bit of ghosting throughout, which did distract quite a bit. Ghosting seems to be of varying quality among different displays so it is hard to say how much it will affect each users experience.

The 2D presentation is pretty good with only a few glaring issues. My biggest problem comes from the stark contrast in resolution. At times you can tell this was shot with HD video cameras, the picture will have insane levels of fine detail, depth and dimension. But in the same scene you’ll see the scene turn into a soft mess with no fine object detail and a glossed over look that appears overly processed. The film does this throughout and its very distracting. Contrast is strong with good shadow detail and colors are a tad oversaturated with obvious stylization. Some of the obvious attempts at 3D effects look a bit silly with the 2D version, but I suppose that is to be expected. The DTS-HD Master Audio mix is strong with lots of explosions and gunshots to work with. The sound design isn’t overly clever and in the end you feel like you get a bit of a paint-by-numbers 5.1 mix, but it still delivers lots of action, low bass and surround use.

The 3D release comes with the 2D Blu-ray as well. You also get a in-movie feature that gives you more insight into the making of the film with onset footage and interviews. The director provides a feature commentary and you also get some deleted scenes.

This is one of those films that was going for ham right from the beginning. No one takes themselves seriously in this one and if you go in with that attitude, it can be a lot of fun. While not as good as the Grindhouse films, they are the closest comparison I can think of for what they were going for here. While the presentation on the 2D release is a mixed bag in the video department, this was a film that was meant to be seen in 3D, cheesy effects and all.