Adam Driver's 65 is a Dino-Bore

The movie where Adam Driver plays a spaceman battling dinosaurs is quite poor.

Nicolas Cage has had just about every conceivable advantage. His uncle Francis Ford Coppola is one of the greatest and most charismatic filmmakers in movie history. The man is a straight-up legend but he’s just the biggest and most legendary name in a show-business dynasty chockablock with talent. 

As a young man Cage was almost impossibly gorgeous. He wasn’t just handsome or good-looking: he was beautiful. But he wasn’t just beautiful and connected: he was also spectacularly talented. 

It’s no exaggeration to say that Cage is one of the most preposterously gifted actors of his generation. Cage is also one of the most accomplished actors of the last half century as well. 

The man won an Academy Award for Best Actor, the most prestigious award in film, for 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas, while barely in his thirties. 

Cage had everything an actor could possibly want: looks, talent, charisma, personality, intensity, success, an uncle who wrote and directed the motion picture The Godfather and also an Academy Award. 

What did Cage do once he had everything? He made some great movies and some crazy movies and some famously terrible motion pictures but mostly this Academy Award winning genius and legend of the silver screen made a shit ton of action movies. 

The Internet Movie Database lists 106 acting credits for Cage, with 6 more on the way. I’ve seen a LOT of those, because I am a huge Nicolas Cage fan and also the host of a podcast devoted to Nicolas Cage and, to a lesser extent, his Face/Off costar John Travolta and I will be the first to concede that at least thirty of those credits are for largely interchangeable action movies where he either plays a good guy with a gun who has to kill all the bad guys to protect himself and his family or a bad guy with a gun who is trying to kill the hero and/or his family. 

Cage is a famously intense method actor who has done things like swallow a live cockroach for his art yet he’s also an insanely prolific and almost impressively undiscriminating action movie star as well. 

The highest praise I can give Adam Driver, consequently, is that he reminds me of Nicolas Cage, my favorite actor, in his intensity, his devotion to his craft, his offbeat good looks and his eccentricity.

He also reminds me of Cage, unfortunately, in his willingness to prostitute his extraordinary gifts as an actor in order to play a generic action hero in an eminently forgettable motion picture. 

Driver isn’t just an actor. Like Cage, he’s an artist as well. He’s a thespian who, in 2021 alone was directed twice by Ridley Scott (The Last Duel and House of Gucci) and once by Leos Carax (Annette). 

In his relatively brief film career Driver has collaborated with Noah Baumbach many times (White Noise, Marriage Story, The Meyerowitz Stories, While We’re Young, Frances Ha), Jim Jarmusch (The Dead Don’t Die, Paterson), Terry Gilliam (The Man Who Shot Don Quixote), Spike Lee (Black KKKlansman), Steven Soderbergh (Logan Lucky), Clint Eastwood (J. Edgar), Steven Spielberg (Lincoln) and the Coen Brothers (Inside Llewyn Davis). Next year he will add Francis Ford Coppola (appropriately enough) and Michael Mann to that distinguished list when he stars in Megalopolis and Ferrari to his resume.

When not working with our greatest living filmmakers Driver somehow found time to be an integral component of the Star Wars sequel trilogy.

The Juilliard-trained former Marine leveraged a solid decade of great work for important filmmakers into a lead role as a space man with a space gun who blasts dinosaurs in our distant past in the staggeringly idiotic new science-fiction thriller 65. 

This invites the question, why? Why would someone who seemingly takes his craft so seriously and has his choice of great auteurs to work with make a movie so transparently dumb and juvenile? 

I suppose it’s possible that the screenplay for 65 really spoke to Driver, and that he’s always nursed a furtive desire to play a space alien who blasts bad dinos, possibly dating back to his time at Julliard. 

It’s more likely that the studio offered Driver a shit ton of money and, being human, he happily accepted despite lacking an intense emotional connection to the material. 

In 65 Driver plays Mills, a resident of the planet Somaris who reluctantly agrees to take on a two year mission to raise money for the treatment of his sick daughter. 

65 spends enough time on Somaris to pluck relentlessly at the heartstrings but not enough to give it any kind of distinctive flavor or personality. Before I became a parent I always found sick children to be a manipulative and borderline cruel plot device. Now that I am a father of two boys I still find it to be a manipulative and borderline cruel plot device but also one that is very effective. 

On his way back to his home planet Mills runs into a meteor shower that splits his spaceship in two and crashes on planet earth during the Cretaceous period. 

Almost all of the space ship’s passengers have died with the exception of Koa (Ariana Greenblatt), a little girl roughly the age of Mills’ sick daughter who does not know that her parents died in the crash. 

Mills is at first despondent over his unfortunate circumstances but he finds a sense of meaning and purpose in helping a little girl who needs him even more than his own desperately ill daughter does. 

Mills and Koa do not speak the same language and his translator device is broken but they find a way to communicate effectively through noises and gestures. 

The two strangers in a strange land become friends in no small part because the little girl reminds him of his own daughter. 

The duo’s predicament seems hopeless but Mills has a big old space gun that apparently does not need space bullets to kill earth dinosaurs as well as some space grenades that are good for blowing up prehistoric bad guys. 

65 takes its sweet time getting to Earth for Driver-on-dino action but it doesn’t really pick up when the beasts enter the equation. The CGI dinosaurs of 65 are a nasty but largely unimpressive lot, a sub-Jurassic World collection of zeroes and ones that fatally lack physicality and mass.

65’s vision of the future is dirty, non-glamorous and working-class. In another context that might work spectacularly but the two movies that 65 reminded me of most are Battlefield Earth and the ill-fated Ray Bradbury adaptation The Sound of Thunder. 

I’m guessing that 65 probably does NOT want to be compared to two of the biggest flops in film history, science-fiction or otherwise. 

65 perplexingly does not have a sense of humor about itself. It’s strangely devoid of levity and playfulness. It does not seem to understand why anyone might find the prospect of Adam Driver playing a laser gun-toting daddy from outer space blasting dinosaurs funny or ridiculous. 65 isn’t intentionally funny but it’s not unintentionally funny either. Those looking for big, campy laughs and thrills are advised to look elsewhere. 

Even more puzzlingly, 65 doesn’t have a sense of fun either. It’s a grim slog that reduces one of the weirdest and most fascinating leading men in all of American film to just another generic action hero killing bad guys and protecting the children, the precious, precious children. 

I chose to watch 65 rather than the Academy Awards. That might have been a mistake. The Oscars are long and self-congratulatory but 65 is a straight up Dino-bore. 

I hope the film’s chilly reception discourages Driver from pursuing projects like this that may pay the bills but at a steep price to his artistic integrity. Driver is too good for movies and roles 65. He’s a thespian but here he’s just another hack chasing an undignified payday. 

One and a Half Stars