He's mad as hell, and he's taking the bad guys there with him

As I plan on telling my son when he starts driving lessons: If you're going to drive angry, you may as well drive angry in 3-D. This explains why I rather liked the energetic, salacious, trashy trash that is "Drive Angry" in, yes, 3-D. It's more fun than "Hall Pass," for example, which suffers from a glaring absence of both angry driving and any sort of dimension. Also, I can't think of a single scene in "Just Go With It" that wouldn't be helped by the sudden, screaming appearance of Nicolas Cage driving either the badass Dodge Charger or the badderasser Chevy Chevelle featured prominently, along with bullets coming at your head and shotgun-blasted limbs flying this way and that, in the scuzziest li'l picture of the new year.

Cage plays John Milton, whose paradise is indeed lost, and whose misdeeds on earth (details of his badness remain vague) have landed him in hell. But he escapes before the start of this nutty lark and returns to earth to avenge the murder of his daughter, who fell afoul of psychopathic satanic cultists, led by Jonah (Billy Burke of the "Twilight" series). Now the dead woman's infant daughter is in danger, and Milton — aided by Amber Heard as a "sexy, tough-as-nails waitress with a '69 Charger," as the press notes describe her — must kill, kill and kill some more, while eluding the mysterious man known as the Accountant, an emissary of hell played by William Fichtner.

Deliberate camp is usually a drag, and much of director and co-writer Patrick Lussier's viscera-strewn mayhem falls into the winky category. But Lussier has marshaled a better-than-usual cast for — well, for just about any movie released in a given February. Cage, this time laboring under dishwater-blond locks, has seriously talented hambone adversaries in Burke's cult leader and Fichtner's nicely tailored factotum from hell. He has also a solid ally in David Morse, who plays one of his old earthly cronies.

As for Heard, she is sexy and tough as nails, though the role — big surprise, given the film's target audience of gamers venturing, cautiously, out of their apartments for a trip to the multiplex — is mainly about her thighs, and how they look in 3-D. "Avatar" it's not. Still, this hybrid of the old '70s junker "Race With the Devil" (well, I saw it when I was 14) and more gratuitously vicious trends of late has its moments. Another John Milton wrote: "Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven." Cage's character would concur, heartily, before reloading.

mjphillips@tribune.com