Title: Dolan’s Cadillac
Starring: Wes Bentley, Christian Slater, Emmanuelle Vaugier
Directed By: Jeff Beesley
Certificate: 18
Director: Jeff Beesley
Writers: Stephen King (novel) and Richard Dooling (screenplay)
Release Date: 1 April 2010
Run time: 89 minutes
Another day, another Stephen King novel adaptation. It seems as though there are more adaptations of Kings writings than there are original scripts throughout the whole of Hollywood. Some are excellent (The Green Mile, Stand By Me, The Shinning). Some are good (It, The Langoliers, The Stand) some a plain terrible (Creepshow, The Tommyknockers, Sleepwalkers). But you can’t blame the quality of output purely on King himself, he is indeed the master when it comes to writing these sort of horror/suspense novels. It’s often largely in the way that they are adapted for the screen, be it the fault of the screenwriter or the director, that makes them the occasional object of fun.
In Dolan’s Cadillac we have a tale of revenge where a young man named Robinson (Wes Bentley) tries to exact his revenge upon Dolan (Christian Slater) a sex trade trafficker of European and Asian women. Robinson and his wife Elizabeth (Emmanuelle Vaugier) witness Dolan killing a group of women and they go into protective custody awaiting a trail to see Dolan put behind bars, the trail never comes because Elizabeth is murdered. Robinson plans his revenge. But frankly he’s a bit rubbish and Dolan and his men are more than a match for him.
Dolan’s Cadillac falls somewhere between complete rubbish and genius, I’ll let you decide exactly where on the scale. The acting is adequate. Slater does pretty much what he always does these days, namely overact a bit and swear quite a lot. Bentley is better, conveying some sense of rage and hatred but he’s nowhere near the brilliance of his performance in American Beauty, even if that was a decade ago.
The direction is also adequate, never falling below a decent level of competency whilst never thrilling or thoroughly impressing. It’s a decent film, a decent story and although the end is needlessly drawn out it basically does what it sets out to do without making too much of a fuss along the way.
