I have to say I didn’t have any expectations for Drive. Maybe I should have brought a few or at least borrowed one from the girl in the back of the theater who keeps yelling out in astonishment when anything violent happened on screen.
I have to say I didn’t have any expectations for Drive. Maybe I should have brought a few or at least borrowed one from the girl in the back of the theater who keeps yelling out in astonishment when anything violent happened on screen.
Drive follows a hollywood stunt driver (Ryan Gosling) as he gets mixed up with some bad people and then inadvertently picks “the wrong job” and it all goes to hell. Pretty basic plot. It all depends on the execution. And with Nicholas Winding Refn directing I do mean execution.
Is it a good movie? Well… sometimes. There are some thoughtful scenes and Refn really seems to understand the language of film but there are plenty of times where it veers off the road, so to speak. Remember Monsters where it didn’t really have that many monsters in it? Same problem here. Not really enough driving. Should have been called Occasionally driving, but also fixing cars, talking, and brooding.
This movie doesn’t know what it wants to be, and that’s its biggest problem. I’m all for genre drifting but you have to do it right. Drive doesn’t. First it’s a drama, then it’s Fast and the Furious with drama, then it’s a crime drama without much driving, then it’s a brutally violent pulp fiction type… pulp fiction movie.
Some of the casting is great, and some of the casting is a bit distracting, like when you say “Hey, that’s the chick from An Education and now she’s blond and looks like Michelle Williams and now I’m watching Blue Valentine”. Albert Brooks does a fantastic job as a villain, but Ron Pearlman, who should have no problem, comes off stiff and bored as his partner.
Ryan Gosling is a great actor, but I’m not sure if “expressionless” is an acting choice. You root for Gosling’s character, but you don’t see anything that different in his character that you haven’t seen Nicholas Cage do in far worse movies.
Drive is uneven, stylized, and has a thing for 80’s eurotrash techno music. I think I may have dated Drive in college. So there are things to like in this movie, but the whole is much less than the sum of its parts, unfortunately.
The only one that should be fired would be the sound designer. My ears were ringing after a way too loud gunshot out of nowhere and you shouldn’t be getting sound effects of slapping and hitting from the Warner Bros Looney Tunes library. Also, quite distracting.
As a director, Refn is talented but needs to reign himself in. I don’t even mean violence wise, but creatively. Create any world you want, but stay there for the full two hours. If I have to be there the whole time, so should the filmmaker.
–Chris Mancini
