For some time I’ve been resigned to a notion that the John Cusack of High Fidelity, Con Air, Being John Malkovich and Hot Tub Time Machine (i.e., the Cusack I knew and identified with and loved) is dead and gone…and that over the last two or three years (excepting his brilliant Richard Nixon performance in The Butler) he’s been trapped in a dark-movie cage playing grimy creeps and behind-the-eight-ball types and lowlife ghouls and sociopaths. I was going to say that his Edgar Allen Poe in The Raven and his hulking swamp yokel in The Paperboy are what did it. (Combined, I suppose, with 1408, a genuinely scary film.) And then, out of nowhere…Scott Coffey‘s Adult World! The old Cusack, or at least a semblance of “that guy”, is back. For now, at least. I’ll be catching it at Hollywood’s The Arena when I get back on Monday.

This is a recently posted trailer for Drive Hard, obviously a piece of low-budget exploitation in which Cusack plays Tom Cruise in Collateral and Tom Jane plays Jamie Foxx.