Movie Review: Black Cadillac (2003)

The movie stars Randy Quaid, Shane Johnson, Josh Hammond, Jason Dohring and Adam Vernier.

I recorded this film off of one of our movie channels a couple weeks ago mostly because I saw Randy Quaid was in it and couldn’t remember a Randy Quaid movie I didn’t like. However, we didn’t get an opportunity to watch it until last night. Unfortunately, while I can’t say it was a bad movie, it really wasn’t anything special either.

My biggest problem with this movie is it takes way too long to get started. Even though we see the Cadillac relatively early in the film, it, and the people driving it, really don’t do a whole lot until the second half of the movie. In fact, some of the early scenes reminded me a lot of the comedy "American Pie," since the bulk of the conversation seemed to be about sex and virginity.

And, even then, the scenes were still relatively tame. Simply put, a good chunk of this movie consisted of two cars drag racing along nearly-deserted country roads. On top of it, despite several claims about them having a bad winter storm (I honestly didn’t see anything I would classify other than flurries), the roads were in great shape. They didn’t even need to drive at high speeds through snow and ice.

The movie also proved to be surprisingly predictable. I knew they made a mistake picking up that deputy (Quaid) and it wasn’t hard to figure out and, at times, guess why they were being followed by the Cadillac and the deputy’s role in all of it. As a result of all of this, the movie never quite reached the level of suspense it needed to in order to be a good thriller.

I did, to be fair, like Quaid in this movie. Even though I kind of figured he was somehow involved with everything that was happening, he played his character well. Even when he was friendly, there was something about him that just didn’t seem trustworthy and, as the movie progressed, he was able to turn things up a notch and be much more menacing than I was expecting. Unfortunately, that just wasn’t enough to save this film.

As I said, it’s not a terrible film. But, it does take a long time to get going and, once it does, it honestly isn’t worth the wait. It was, at best, average.

My Grade: C