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Sunday, February 12, 2012

‘Dolan’s Cadillac’ makes for cinematic burning sensation

EDITOR’S NOTE: Redbox machines are full of terrible B-movies. You know it. I know it. Each week, a brave Daily staffer will take the plunge and watch one of them so you don’t have to.

Sadly, my favorite movie genre — drama — was severely picked over when I went Redbox diving last weekend. So I went with basically the only bottom-feeding drama that caught my eye: ”Dolan’s Cadillac,” starring Christian Slater as Dolan. The only Christian Slater work I’m familiar with is an episode of “The Office” in which he makes a brief cameo, so I thought I would give him another chance.

Opening the movie is Robinson (Wes Bentley), a man whose wife is later murdered in a fiery car explosion because she witnessed one of Dolan’s nefarious deeds. Robinson mysteriously declares, “He looks like anybody you see in the street, but when he grins, birds fall off of telephone poles, and when he looks at you a certain way, your prostate goes bad and your urine burns.” And so the stage is set for the mysterious Dolan, a man whose very glances can affect your urinary tract.

Dolan’s complexity continues to build throughout the film. Robinson, disgruntled by the police’s efforts to stop Dolan’s sex trafficking ring, decides to go vigilante and destroy Dolan himself, buying a gun that the gun store clerk declares will not only “make his day,” but “make his decade.”

Robinson’s determination leads him to work on the highway that Dolan often traverses in his trafficking exploits. Robinson cleverly uses his position as a road worker to leave a gaping hole in the highway and cover it with a tarp that looks just like the road.

When Dolan travels on the highway in the coveted titular Cadillac, he falls through the mirage into a pit designed to kill him. In a twist of irony that would make any English professor proud, Robinson begins to bury Dolan alive in his beloved Caddy, something that Dolan did to unsuspecting sex trafficking victims earlier in the movie (minus the Cadillac).

The movie ends with Robinson becoming a monster to avenge his deceased wife, burying Dolan alive in his pimpin’ Caddy while Dolan screams and throws numerous f-bombs Robinson’s way.

Dolan dies pathetically, puffing on an oxygen mask that was conveniently by his side. Throughout the movie Dolan is clearly the intellectual, often ranting and raving about how it is the United States immigration policy that is causing so much sex trafficking, while seemingly unaware he has a bit to do with the problem himself.

I pondered if the beloved black Caddy was perhaps some sort of symbol for Dolan. Maybe it was the government that Dolan thought was enabling him to pursue his line of work. Maybe it was Dolan’s own ego, so overinflated and reality-skewed that it literally ran into a hole in the road.

But in the end I determined the black Caddy was just what Dolan said it to be and nothing more.

“Jimmy Dolan’s Caddy is a hard baby, is it not?!”

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