If you look for another car chase action flick, then you are on the wrong highway: Drive is a character-driven, sophisticated, moody film noir. Sometimes slow-paced, sometimes fast and brutal, Drive will still be a bumpy, but deeply satisfying ride, where you will be shaken for sure.

 

Hollywood stunt car driver and mechanic the day, getaway car driver the night and sociopath altogether, the Driver is a stoic, sad-eyed man of few words, but very quick and brutal when needed. He has a promising future: besides his various successful jobs, his boss wants to promote him as a car racer. Still, he finds himself in deep trouble when he decides to help the husband of his pretty female neighbour.

They drive him crazy

As far as the basic story goes, Drive could have been just another action movie, but director Nicolas Winding Refn, fortunately, made it into a typical, yet sometimes surprising or shocking film noir.

Ray Gosling Driver’s character is a clear allusion to Ryan O’Neal’s same kind of nameless hero in Walter Hill’s Driver and to other stoic, lonely, silent, but deadly heroes as well like the ones played by Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood or Steve McQueen.

Still, Drive goes further in its character study. Gosling’s Driver is clearly a sociopath, who can lose his coolness and can be extremely brutal. This sudden violence makes his character deeper, more dangerous, and more interesting altogether. His more complex character makes him more human, but also sometimes it’s not easy to sympathize with him, even if his brutality is mostly justified.

Metal to the pedal?

While Drive is mostly a violent film noir and deep character study, there are still a few car chases in the movie, which are unsurprisingly more realistic, then those in Fast and Furious for example, still, they are adrenalin rushing and perfectly done. The action in the movie is also very violent and realistic, reminiscent to Quentin Tarantino’s work.

Still, the violence is contained for a long time in the first part of the movie, while we see the Driver’s career path and the romance with his pretty neighbour building up. Everything is so perfect for him, that it’s just begging to mess up completely pretty soon and it will mess up for sure.

Absolute noir…

Drive is a film noir par excellence, with a doomed hero who is thrown in a deep mess, where the situation soon gets out of his control. Death takes his toll suddenly and violently and the movie doesn’t shy away from shocking scenes either, which are fitting perfectly in the logic of the whole movie, not just thrown there for the sake of cheap thrills.

Drive was one of the best movies of last year, and it’s a well worth to buy from the Blu-ray link below. Only watch this movie on your big TV set, and forget the mobile version this time: this ride deserves to be taken seriously.

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