Drive Review
Rotten Tomatometer score = 93%
Drive is style over substance purified and invoked into movie form. The movie begins with a series of meaningless, meandering shots of Gosling driving around a city to atmospheric synth-driven music, as though that one scene from Heat had been strectched out to fill half of a movie. The first half of the movie was so empty that it was impossible to even make a judgment as to how it was panning out, but shortly after the mid-way point I had that ‘the ending of this movie better be amazing or this is going to be a waste of time,’ feeling. It was about at this point that the onscreen action heated up for some inexplicable reason.
Gosling’s character presents as the cool, untouchable loner in the first half of the movie, and then suddenly puts everything on the line on the flimsiest of pretenses. So uncharacteristic is this flip-flop that Bryan Cranston’s character has to spell it out for everyone straight up, just to remind anyone who cares why all of this is happening. From here on out it all gets pretty stupid, with one of the criminal masterminds involved going around visiting improbable deaths upon lesser characters with his trusty blade, which he keeps in a display case in his house. Everything is very gory, because that’s in dramatic contrast to the snoozefest opening half. Gosling goes around not saying much and stomping peoples’ heads in and slowly murdering idiots while wearing a rubber mask. It’s all very, very stupid and very, very gory and if any of the critics listed on Rotten Tomatoes had been paying attention to the story rather than the cinematic glitter then this movie wouldn’t have got so far up the ratings ladder.
Granted, some of the scenes are beautiful shot, with one scene in particular – featuring a motionless Gosling shadow-dappled in the light of a setting in sun, achieving beauty that is nothing short of mesmerising. In the final analysis this movie just feels like a collection of interesting scenes someone has half-thought about, shot beautifully and put to moody electro music. Some reviewers argue that the movie returns us to some 80’s hey-day of empty, but entertaining cinema. My retort to that is that Cobra is an 80’s movie, and it’s absolute shit. It was absolute shit then, and it’s absolute shit now. If you don’t have a story, if you don’t have substance on your side, then in the end all you are left with is style, and that only accounts for 30% of a full movie. Entertaining like a fake stomped-in head or a rubber mask, Drive gets 50% – extra points for some beautifully-shot scenes.
Run and Stumble 