Drive Movie Review
Overall pretty good, although not without it’s issues, which I will get into in a minute. Incidentally, I seem to have picked up a movie viewing partner, at least for the non violent or horror films. She liked it as well, but was bitter about the lack of Ryan Gosling without his shirt off. No, we are not a couple, nor are we likely to be.
The movie starts off great, with the completely unnamed protagonist (which bugs me, by the way. Even the tire in Rubber got a name. It just smacks of pretension) Ryan Gosling delivering very specific and chilling instructions to a client who is hiring him to drive a getaway vehicle for a robbery. While I question the need any petty B&E criminal might have to hire a professional driver they don’t know when there are millions of people who can drive in LA, it does lead us into a really cool cop chase/stealth sequence through the streets of downtown LA (actually most of the film seemed to be shot within six blocks of this cruddy studio apartment I had when I lived in the sphincter of Los Angeles). After that, the film pacing slips from third gear (expect a lot of car and driving jokes in this review) into park as we go through 25 minutes of sluggish character and plot development. I say character development as there is no other term for it, but due to the fact that except for his job description speech (which he delivers twice) Ryan Gosling does not say more than five words at a time for the entire rest of the movie. He gives a new face to the term taciturn.
It seems cool at first, but eventually you just want to shake him until he gives us something. We go the entire movie learning nothing about him, his past, or his motivations. We find out that he works as a Hollywood stunt driver and auto mechanic. He is an excellent driver. The end. His actions seem inconsistent as well. One minute he is risking his life to help his neighbor and love interest get her ex con husband out of debt to some bad people, and the next he is punching another girl in the face. You gain nothing about him as a human, and during the course of the film seems as inanimate as one of the cars he drives.
Anyway, the driver has a friend who is trying to set him up in the stock car business, and is borrowing money from gangsters. Meanwhile, he is falling in love (maybe. His actions and facial expressions could mean anything) with his neighbor, the super cute and innocent looking Carey Mulligan (not a lot of stuff I’m familiar with. Pride and Predjudice, I guess. She had a role for a while on Dr. Who. David Tennant image courtesy of the TV show t shirts), who has a kid who bonds with him as well. Unfortunately the baby daddy (played 
really well by Oscar Isaac. You might remember him as Blue from Sucker Punch) is in prison for some ill defined crime and once he gets out has to rob a pawn shop for guys he owes money from. At that point the movie gets a little confusing. The crime goes perfectly to a point but there is some other car there to stop their getaway. The husband gets killed but the driver and some girl accomplice get away from the other car. They try to figure out what is going on and the driver punches the girl in the face in order to get her to tell him what she knows. Somehow one of the gangsters (Ron Perlman, one of my favorites. I’m glad to see he finally found a script that didn’t totally suck) they got involved with for the stock car deal wanted them to rob the pawn shop of some money from a different East Coast gangster. It is implied he sent the second car to screw with them but there is never any attempt to really explain what it was doing there, except for adding an exciting chase and crash sequence. Now they all want each other dead. Gangster like hijinks ensues. The driver (again without any explanation of where he comes from) proves to be an expert with a wide array of weapons and violence. The movie ends on kind of a cool, interesting note.
The stars. Good cast from top to bottom. I like every actor in here and bought them all at face value. Two stars. Attempt at a more complicated non-linear plot. One star. While there was less driving in the movie than the title would imply, what driving there was was well executed and cool. One star. While Ryan Gosling could have had a mannequin stand in for most of his scenes, the acting from everyone else was really good. One star. The ending was very cool and not what you would expect. One star. Cool noir feel. One star. A number of pretty cool cars throughout the film. One star. Some completely pointless gratuitous nudity (every gangster should be headquartered in a strip club in my opinion). One star. They didn’t hold back on the violence or try to spare anyone in the interest of softening the film. This movie earned its R rating. One star. Total: ten stars.
The black holes. A couple really glaring plot holes, especially the whole “why the hell was that second car at the robbery?” one that kept me up last night. If the guys in it worked for the East Coast mobsters then why didn’t they stop the robbery? If they worked for Ron Perlman than their presence literally made zero sense, as he was due to collect the loot anyway and could have killed the robbers at his convenience. It’s like a splinter in my brain. Two black holes. The pacing was really weird. Started off moderately fast, slowed down to a crawl, picked up for a while, slowed down again, picked up, and then kind of petered out at the end. One black hole. The whole “I’m never going to say a word about my past, opinions, feelings, or anything” really started to grind on me once in a while. It would be OK for the driver character to say something human once during the movie, like “Ouch” as his buddy is picking shotgun pellets out of his arm with no anesthetic. The Terminator had more emotion. One black hole. They did the whole “I’m going to ram your car twice with mine at night, once hard enough to T-bone your parked car off a cliff, and show no damage to my front grill. Both headlights will remain perfectly functional” thing. One black hole. Ryan Gosling’s character kind of lost a lot of sympathy from me when he punched that girl in the face and then choked her until she told him what she knew (sorry, but violence against women, like cruelty to animals, really puts me off my feed). It would have worked if he were supposed to be the bad guy. One black hole. Total: six black holes.
In the irksome but not black hole worthy category I have a few. For a movie that did the first hour with no violence whatsoever, when they finally got it going it was as violent and horrible as anything I have ever seen. The disparity kind of derailed the whole movie for me. It just shifted the tone a lot. I won’t black hole it, as I think the issue was just a lack of opportunity to show that level of violence in the first half, but there it is. Also, the loving romance between Carey Mulligan and ex con Oscar Isaac felt really fake and force. I don’t know a woman in the world who would have hung out for him. If you see the movie you will understand what I mean. Finally, for a movie called “Drive” there didn’t seem to be a lot of driving going on, and a lot of what there was seemed to be leisurely cruising around LA. Say what you will about movies like the Fast and the Furious, but when they claim to be driving films they include a ton of driving.
So a total of four stars. Not bad, not great. If you are a fan of Ryan Gosling you might be disappointing, as he spent most of the movie wearing a puffy 80’s style jacket and not really saying anything (most of the style and sound track was very 80’s). If you like driving you might be disappointing, as the driving sequences don’t really drive the film. If you like clever gangster movies you might be disappointed as the story seems to not really connect a lot. However, if you find pleasure in all three you could very well enjoy yourself. I’d say its worth watching. Nothing really draws you in to a big screen, so NetFlix it. I don’t recommend this for a date, as one second you are watching a passionate kiss and the next you are literally watching some guy get his head stomped flat.
Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. I’m trying to say more on there. I plan to see Straw Dogs tonight so look for that review tomorrow. Talk to you soon.
Dave
