In "Gone in 60 Seconds" Nicolas Cage plays a reformed car thief, who is forced to go back into the business in order to save his younger brother who has managed to get himself into grief with the town's nastiest bad guy. In exchange for the life of his brother, Cage must steal and supply 50 different vehicles, as specified by the bad guy, within a period of just a few days. As time ticks on, Cage desperately has to balance his grand plans, with few resources, and the interference of the local police force, who are becoming ever closer to discovering the operation. The premise is quite simple - a race against time, battling against the odds to save the life of his brother.

Where the film goes fundamentally wrong is within the nature of the plot. Once Cage accepts the mission, a countdown appears at intervals on the screen, to point out how much time Cage has got left to carry out the mission. This is really the only attempt by the Director to instigate any kind of excitement or tension. In his wisdom, Cage decides that it would be best to steal the 50 cars on the last night before the deadline, as the team would otherwise run the risk of being caught by the police before the cars can be passed to the bad guys. This automatically removes any excitement from the days preceeding the last night, as Cage's team aren't really doing anything at all. The key to an exciting "race against the clock" theme is to show things gradually going wrong, and unexpected events changing the way things have to be done. In this film, this simply doesn't happen. The result is that the viewer is left not really caring whether Cage is going to complete his mission at all.

To make matters worse, the film suffers from an extremely poor set of characters. Cage himself is inanimate at the best of times and inspires little excitement within his tawdry bunch of colleagues. Vinnie Jones crops up as - surprise surprise - a hard man. Jones' character is mute, which at least spares us Vinnie's attempts at conversation. Jones' wise-cracking partner provided some amusing lines, but even these seemed to wear thin after a while. Perhaps the worst member of the cast is Christopher Eccleston, whose Cockney gangster seems particularly out of place, and is about as fearsome as a Woolworth's checkout operator. This villain is so tough that his prime concern rests with the prevention of damage to his hand-made furniture. Oh dear.

For me, the film's saving grace was the energetic sound track, including well-known tunes from Groove Armada and Apollo Four Forty. My favourite piece has to be the music from the Marmite advert (not sure who the artist or title is). The music never seems to rest throughout the film, and most tracks used were well-chosen and well-placed.