Dolan's Cadillac (2009)

Locked as it is in the "Stephen King adaptation" genre, this movie had little chance of being more than a workmanlike piece of suspense, but it is well done and gets lots of little details right. Bentley and Slater are, of course, the real reasons to watch this movie, and they really get into their roles and make you believe they are their characters. That's a little more impressive with Slater, of course, since he once was a "A" list celebrity, but you have to respect the craft and intelligence of the two actors, and it's obvious the director knew how to get what he wanted out of them. The story itself is a neat, satisfying little revenge fantasy with a good visual setup. One caution: this one builds quite slowly, and you might find the first 30 minutes or so a bit dull. But the first part of the screenplay sets things up quite nicely for the payoff,and it is quite a payoff. Glad I picked this one up for a remaindered price - if I had paid the usual "new" copy price when it came out, I still would have been happy.

Robinson (Wes Bentley) and his wife Elizabeth (Emmanuelle Vaugier) are fellow school teachers. Elizabeth is horse riding in the desert and runs across human traffickers. The fans in the truck broke down killing some of the girls. Elizabeth witnesses gangster pimp Jimmy Dolan (Christian Slater) killing the drivers and one girl trying to escape. She rides away but loses her phone. The couple reports it to the police but he is uninterested in the illegals. They go home to find one of the dead girls in their bed and they go to the FBI. She's committed to testifying but is killed in a car bomb. Robinson falls into a deep depression and then aims to take revenge. Meanwhile Dolan is disagreeing on payment with the Snakeheads.Christian Slater is chewing up the screen. He is a good bad guy. Wes Bentley has crazy eyes. He looks like he's permanently tense. It doesn't allow him to change his character's feelings and the character goes through a lot of changes. It's one of the big problems. The other problem is the general lack of production value. I assume it's due to a lower budget and won't fault the movie for it. It has the basis of a good psychological thriller but Wes is not able to deliver it completely.

I can't believe this film was the imagination of Stephen King. This crap is almost a ninety minute view of torture. Christian Slater playing evil and he doesn't do a half bad job of it as mob guy/slave trader, Dolan, who's now resorted to selling kids for suck clientele, and profiting fruitfully from it. He has his own supply of costumes on standby too, so he's got his s..t together. A beautiful witness, (Mia from Two And A Half Men) who has seen at first hand, the special cargo being loaded up, is taken out. The boyfriend, a teacher, now becomes completely obsessed and psychologically hell bent on tasking out Slater, first being worked over by him which intensifies his rage. Her image burns in his memory as he's sees a phantom of her on the lonely highway. He hatches a plan. He becomes a road worker, and carves out a section of loose bitumin, to entrap our Slater, which of course works, where Dolan's Cadillac goes under, with Slater begging for mercy. No suspense here, or in anything. That's it. End of movie. We see Slater minutes before going under, viewing some of the kiddies, on his laptop, holding numbers, a pang of conscience, looking away before looking back, but this son of a bitch has dug his own grave, the same place this movie should be laid to rest. The best part of this dreck is some of the hot girls in lingerie, put on show, but apart from that, forget it, this Cadillac sucks, this movie robbing people of their valuable time.

The director of DOLAN'S CADILLAC, Jeff Beesley, was told by his agent, "If you can't knock this movie outta the park, you might as well forget it - go back to pumping gas." Uh, Jeff, I got some bad news....From a Stephen King short story of the same name (from the 1993 collection, Nightmares and Dreamscapes), screenwriter Richard Dooling misses the point completely and somehow thinks he can improve on a writing legend's plot elements - much like the rewriters of THE SOUND OF THUNDER (2005) had the brass balls to think they could improve on a Ray Bradbury story. DOLAN'S CADILLAC - a straight-to-DVD release - is another great Stephen King story wasted onto the small screen.Robinson (Wes Bentley) and wife Elizabeth (Emmanuelle Vaugier) are a regular Las Vegas couple, whose life is upended when Elizabeth witnesses human-trafficker Dolan (Christian Slater) execute people in the Nevada desert. Dolan has her killed. Robinson gets revenge in a very unique, exacting way.Dolan is chauffered around in a bulletproof Cadillac as fortified as a tank. In the short story, Robinson uses this fact to entomb Dolan in a highway grave, the first person narrative pathologically taking us through the meticulous life-planning and interesting physics of devising the trap. In the book, the "arc of descent" becomes a blueprint for Robinson's subterranean trap and a metaphor for his psychological and physical deterioration. While in the movie, the arc of descent is something that Dolan pulls out of thin air while standing at a pee trough. Was that the writer's subliminal message to us?: I'm URINATING ALL OVER STEPHEN KING! King's characters are efficiently made two-dimensional by leaden Wes Bentley (whose terrifically vapid performance in GHOST RIDER must have scored him this role) and Christian Slater, getting drunk on Jack (Nicholson, not Daniels). The highway trap is merely a flat drop covered with tarpaulin. No science required.In trying to extend King's story to movie length, instead of inserting all those interesting master plan elements, which would have drawn out the time compellingly, screenwriter Dooling puts in banalities: Robinson buying a Dirty Harry gun, Dolan extending his trafficking to children, Chinese mobsters, an FBI guy (Al Sapienza from THE SOPRANOS) and loads of black mascara for Wes Bentley in lieu of acting.To hear director Beesley speak of his filmic debacle in the DVD Featurette is to wonder whether he has ever viewed his own film: "...extremely entertaining... a great ride... a Saturday night popcorn movie..." And here's the one that made peanuts fly out of my nose: "At its heart it's very much an art film." Choke. Gasp. Bwohahahahahaha!King's story was an homage to Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado in subtle, disturbing ways; story described in detail how Dolan's highway grave could never be discovered. Beesley's movie gives us a scene of Robinson shifting a final stone slab into place over Dolan's screaming face, for the sole reason to echo Poe's (and King's) words, "For the love of God, no!" But this final homage is Beesley's final illogical mistake. The manner in which Beesley's trap is built is rife for discovery by authorities; the final stupid stone over Beesley's own face.Poe and King have assured themselves their places in history. Beesley has assured himself a career at the Shell Gas-N-Go.Fill 'er up please, Jeff.