Review: 'Drive' is a uniquely styled action movie

Film: Drive
Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Cast:  Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Oscar Isaac, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman
Rating: ***1/2

For a film called Drive, one would naturally expect to be served high octane chases sequences, or at least a protagonist who displays charismatic exuberance. Expect instead a ponderous, yet undeniably stylised, neo-noir centred on a mysterious, silent and for the most part stone-faced, scorpion jacket-wearing stunt car driver/mechanic/criminal accomplice/enigma played by Ryan Gosling.

As with every noirish crime caper, the plot tends to get a little convoluted midway. So, sticking to the bare essentials, the driver (let’s call him that; much like Clint Eastwood in the Dollars trilogy, he hasn’t a name) works for down-and-out garage owner Shannon (Cranston) who convinces seedy gangster Bernie Rose (Brooks )and associate Nino (Perlman) to financially back the talented lad in an auto racing sport event. The driver, when he isn’t risking his life on sets, also adeptly makes getaways, a service which several heisters avail of from time to time though the sullen stalwart, naturally, has his terms and conditions.

And when his pixie-ish nieghbour Irene (Mulligan) and her son (whom he has come to love) come under a threat by mobsters whom her ex-conman husband Standard (Isaac) owed money, the driver goes out for a spin once again. But when the heist, where he plays wheelman for Standard and one of his creditor’s women Blanche (Hendricks), at the designated pawn shop suddenly starts spiraling out of control, the driver finds himself in another race, for his survival and his loved ones’.

Drive is a curious film. Among the other things that Drive has going for it is this nifty’80s vibe (thanks to the pulsing retro-sounding europop soundtrack whose lyrics set moods and sometimes describe the ‘hero’ in more words than he would care to use) Striking footage like that of the cold, alienating myriad glassy facades of artificially illuminated skyscrapers rising up against an ink-black night sky in the film’s beginning that. 

But the film is far from a glorified, over-long music video. The slow-burn pacing and the sparseness of dialogue (add shaky cam and, hey, you have a full-fledged art film on your hands!), in combination with cinematography and wonderful lighting work give the film a glossy, oneiric tone.

[Potential spoiler] But then the film jolts you out the dreaminess with a rapid eruption of scenes of exquisite, celluloid-worthy violence that, at its most outlandish (the film’s more gruesome scene is one that is undisputedly stomach-turning) evokes slasher movie imagery.

Gosling as the driver gets a chance to channel his inner Steven Seagal (in both reticence and propensity for outbursts of ass-kicking)while being child-like tenderness and vulnerable and. Perlman is brilliant as the infantile yet brutish Nino, who is resentful over the fact that he is sidelined by the mob for being Jewish. As is Brooks as the pragmatic hoodlum to whom brutality and assassination are merely expedients.

Drive, a minimalist action film which revisits the genre, is at heart a love story, though it isn’t the most nonlinear or unpredictable one you will ever see. But, for its styling and performances, give it a shot.