Drive is adapted from a novel by James Sallis but it wouldn’t have surprised me if it had been based on a video game. With its focus on action, minimalist dialogue and car chase sequences, it is tailor-made for the joystick generation.
Ryan Gosling is perfectly cast as the man with no name and as strong and silent as Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western. He plays a mechanic and a part-time movie stunt driver who moonlights as a the go to guy when you need a fast getaway from the scene of a crime.
The thrilling opening scene shows what he can do behind the wheel of a fast car, outwitting the police with ease. Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn shoots the scenes from his perspective so you get a point of view effect of being in the car with him (another feature that would easily transfer to a video game).
When he’s on these jobs he is unarmed and for half of the movie he seems like a white knight in a silver bomber jacket who can handle himself without resorting to violence.
He befriends a neighbour, Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her young son. He fancies her but respects the fact that she is married and, improbably, they remain as just good friends.
Her husband is in jail when they meet and it is when he is released that the movie takes a more sinister turn. A mafia style gang is on the guy’s back and our hero chivalrously/recklessly offers to help. Things go badly wrong and it all gets very bloody indeed.
We see another side of the driver as he disposes of the bad guys, mostly with his bare hands or, in the most brutal killing of all, with his boots. After witnessing what he is capable of, Irene wisely decides to give him a wide berth but their lives are by this time irreversibly intertwined.
Drive is a stylish neo-noir macho thriller; it brazenly reworks familiar movie clichés but despite being emotionally as cold as a frozen pizza, it manages to convey an intelligence to raise it above other all-action no-brains thrillers.
