Drive (2011)

Directed by: Nicolas Winding Refn

By day, the Driver (Ryan Gosling), whose name we do not learn, works as an auto repairman, and as a stunt driver for the movies, and dabbles in low-end auto-racing.  You’d think three jobs would keep a guy busy enough, but in his spare time the Driver also works as a getaway specialist (“I give you a five minute window” is his proposition to the armed robbers he transports to and from their gigs).  He is a super-cool supplier of driving services, largely expressionless and almost mute.

When the just-out-of-prison husband of a pretty neighbour (Carey Mulligan) with whom he’s had a mild flirtation is threatened, the Driver agrees to help him with a robbery to get the bad guys (who turn out to be associates of the funder of his racing venture) off hubby’s back…

Let me start with a confession: I am clearly going against the tide on this one, but I have to write it the way I see it.  Drive has been getting very positive reviews from both critics and the public in North America, and I am at a loss to understand why.  It’s not that exciting, and has a particularly un-engaging lead character who stops, for me at least, some way short of being a hero because he is quite happy to make money from assisting with armed robberies, while missing all of the other attributes (such as a tragic back-story, or even a great sense of humour) that would make him an anti-hero in the Butch and Sundance mould.

The movie is at pains to tell us how good a driver Ryan Gosling’s character is.  He is known to us simply as The Driver, as though any other name would simply fail to describe what he is, and people (well, mainly his boss at the auto-shop) gush over his abilities.  But  when a heist goes wrong, the superstar driver can’t manage to put any distance between his souped-up coupé and the bad guys who are chasing him in what looks like a fat Chrysler 300.

There are too many other moments where you find yourself asking “Why did that just happen?” Examples: the Driver disguises himself using a rubber mask from his movie-stunt work to go looking for bad-guy Ron Perlman, but for no reason, as he never gets into Perlman’s presence until the point where a disguise is no use anyway.  And when he does confront Perlman, having run him off the road on to a beach, the injured crook tries to escape not by running along the sand, or by pulling out a gun or knife, but by running into the one place from he cannot escape: the Pacific Ocean. There’s also far too much coincidence driving the plot, which feels lazy.

It’s odd that Refn, whose work on Valhalla Rising I really enjoyed, has delivered this.  Odder still that it’s so popular.