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DVD Review


DVD cover

Dolan's Cadillac

 

Starring: Wes Bentley, Christian Slater and Emmanuelle Vaugier
Momentum Pictures
RRP: £15.99
MP1051D
Certificate: 15
Available 12 April 2010


Robinson (Wes Bently) shares a pleasant life with his pregnant wife Elizabeth (Emmanuelle Vaugier), a life which is tragically cut short when she witnesses crime boss Jimmy Dolan (Christian Slater) executing the driver of an illegal people trafficker. Intent on testifying against him, Dolan has her blown up. Distraught with the loss and tortured by visions of his dead wife, Robinson is ill equipped to take revenge, until he discovers that Dolan repeatedly takes the same trip across the desert...

Dolan’s Cadillac (2009 - 1 hr, 25 min, 20 sec) is a thriller based on a short story by Stephen King. The film was directed by Jeff Beesley from a Richard Dooling screenplay.

The plot is pretty simple, as you would expect from a short story. Having lost his wife Robinson goes on to lose his mind and after an aborted attempt to just kill Dolan, with a gun the size of a canon, comes up with a elaborate plan which involves heavy machinery. The reason for this is Dolan’s Cadillac, which he pretty much lives in, has the construction of a small fortress. For those of the audience that didn't quite get the premise there is a scene which Robinson witnesses with a whole bunch of bad guys letting rip with their automatic weapons and barely scratching the surface.

I liked the central performances of Slater, suitably slimy as the trafficker in human beings, though Bently’s portrayal of Robinson's decent into a surreal form of madness is protracted, betraying the shortness of the source material and in the end unconvincing. Once the film gets passed a padded first section it settles down into a pretty decent revenge movie, and even though Robinson’s final solution seems overly elaborate, it does have that macabre King touch about it.

Having been padded out, the film feels uneven, with much of the king story consigned to the second and better, half of the film. In the end this would have worked well, in a shorter form, as part of some anthology show, as a full feature it falls a little flat.

The disc does come with a couple of extras. Behind the Wheels of Dolan’s Cadillac (24 min, 02 sec) is your average making of feature with contributions from the cast and crew. There is not much in the way of depth and much of the information is stuff you should already know if you have just watched the film. B-Roll (19 min, 38 sec) contains no explanation or voice over, consisting of film of the movie being made, all the material is behind the scenes, but it would have benefited from some added context.

6

Charles Packer

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