Gone Too Long Wisecracks Offer No Security Against Monotonous Car-Chase Scenes

‘Gone in 60 Seconds”? If only it were.

A moderately enjoyable action movie that seriously overstays its welcome, “Gone in 60 Seconds” has a pleasurably idiotic plot that can be summed up in four words: Gang swipes 50 cars.

Led by Nicolas Cage, Angelina Jolie and Robert Duvall, they have to do it in three days or Cage’s brother (Giovanni Ribisi) will be killed.

Fine, then. A dopey premise, it promises lots of exciting car chases, inventive car bust-ins and some smart-alecky dialogue, but “Gone” manages to deliver only on the dialogue. Scott Rosenberg’s script contains an unforgivable rip-off of the Silent Bob character in “Clerks” but otherwise achieves a perfect, don’t-take-anything-too-seriously tone, peppered with plenty of ironic wisecracks.

This is the kind of lowbrow entertainment that relies on speed and energy — get in, get out and get us 90 minutes of cheap thrills, please, and hold the Method Acting crapola.

So, hiring three Oscar winners to inhabit these B-movie roles is the acting equivalent of using velvet as toilet paper. Cage, Jolie and Duvall are fine (Jolie gives the movie sex appeal that isn’t there in the script, and Cage is hilarious when he makes like the Kerouac of Cadillacs, delivering a goofy poem about boosting wheels), but they create grandiose expectations “Gone” can’t — and shouldn’t — meet.

A bigger problem is the slackness of the whole thing. Director Dominic Sena, whose main credits are Janet Jackson music videos, knows how to create gorgeous images, but he has no idea how to edit them together. “Gone” climaxes with a high-speed car chase in downtown Los Angeles, with Cage whirling in and out of alleys, narrowly avoiding semis and backing down one-way streets. Exciting stuff, right?

Nope. Sena doesn’t know how to build up our expectations by sneaking us little bits of information, so there’s no suspense — just one screeching tire after another.

He doesn’t know when to quit, either. A natural ending point would be when the gang snags the 50th car, but “Gone,” which is 20 minutes longer than the 1974 film it remakes, drags things out with a tedious subplot and a bunch of sentimental hoo-ha about the relationship between the brothers.

We might forgive all of those missteps — this is not art, obviously — if “Gone” included a few ingenious scenes of car thievery, but Sena is so busy making sure the camera never rests for longer than two seconds that he doesn’t even deliver on that.

The title refers to the time it takes to steal a car, but all the thefts here are accomplished in a few seconds. It looks ridiculously easy to derail the supposedly impenetrable security systems in the new Mercedes, for instance, and no details are offered about how an inventive thief does it.

The people who made “Gone” may have been nervous about teaching all of us to be car thieves, but the movie sorely misses the behind-the-scenes feeling we’d get if it stood still for a minute to show us exactly what happens in those 60 seconds before the car is gone.

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“Gone in 60 Seconds”

Locations: Lincoln Heights, Newport Highway, River Park Square, Spokane Valley, Coeur d’Alene Cinemas

Credits: Directed by Dominic Sena, starring Nicolas Cage, Angelina Jolie, Robert Duvall, Giovanni Ribisi, Delroy Lindo, Will Patton

Running time: 1:59

Rating: PG-13