"Drive" Starts Off Too Slow...Then Crashes Violently

As you all know, my latest review was for Contagion, which I had very mixed feelings about.  What you may not know, however, is that while waiting for that movie to begin, all I wanted to do was see Drive.  It was one of the previews before Contagion and I had been dying to see it.  So a few days ago I went to check it out feeling pretty pumped about it, but man was I disappointed.

The film starts out very quiet with no more than a few words spoken.  We follow the "hero," Ryan Gosling, who is simply called "Driver," carry out one of his missions.  And I'm not going to lie, he's a badass.  However, towards the latter half of the film, I wasn't expecting him to turn out to be a genuine psycho rather than a James Bond-like protagonist.  But I'll get to that later.  

So Gosling is helping some guys rob a place and uses his unique driving skills to avoid the cops as they flee the scene of the crime.  With this downright cool sequence, I really thought I was in for something incredible.  Then the '80s style credits roll, followed by about an hour of Gosling falling for Carey Mulligan and hanging out with her kid while the father is in prison.  These 60 minutes feature about twenty full sentences, with so few words from Gosling I could count them on one hand, one short scene giving evidence to the fact that Gosling is a stunt driver for the movies, a couple of parts featuring Gosling working as a mechanic for Bryan Cranston, and two *t0t@l1y hiP* songs.  

The director, Nicolas Winding Refn, throws in a little thing about Albert Brooks, head honcho of the mob, asking Gosling to be a stock car driver, but the main focus so far is the love story.  This begins to fall apart when the husband, played by Oscar Isaac, comes home from prison.  He is in a lot of trouble and the bad guys say they will hurt his family.  Gosling will have none of this.  He goes on a mission to steal a million bucks from a pawn shop with the husband to pay for his protection.  Things go terribly wrong and here comes the violence.  I remember reading that this movie may be too violent for some and for the first hour I was thinking, "What the hell are these people talking about?"  I shut up the second someone got their head blown to smithereens.  Now the film changes from super indy/artsy to unnecessarily violent.  I mean, the kills are pretty cool, but it was just too drastic of a change.  The gangsters, including Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman (who looks like Johnny Drama's cartoon character, Johnny Bananas on Entourage) want to kill everyone who stole the money and keep the million for themselves.  Ryan Gosling goes f***ing nuts.  As I watched him beat people to a pulp (he never uses a gun), I thought, "How could this quiet, calm man be so crazy?"  Then I realized, most of the quiet ones are.  I was completely caught off guard and didn't know how to react.  Anyway he tries to hunt them all down, a ton of people die, there are about five way over the top kills, and it ends all symbolically.

Now I'll admit that the film is very stylishly directed, explaining why Refn won Best Director at Cannes.  However, I think the abundance of fancy mise-en-scene (yeah, just learned that in my communications class, look it up) makes it seem as if the actors are performing amazingly.  Is it really so hard to not say anything and just look cool?  Maybe, but I don't think so.  I can see why some would consider this a masterpiece, but it didn't really dazzle me.  The more I think about it, the more I imagine how completely wrong I could be.  I've never seen A Clockwork Orange, but I believe I feel the same way about Drive as people who have seen Clockwork feel about that.  A masterpiece, but kind of slow and gross?  I'm not too sure.  I just feel that a lot more could have been done.  He barely even drives in the movie.  I'm not exactly saying I wanted it to be a studio film, but if there were more missions showing him being the getaway guy, more peeks into the life of a Hollywood stunt driver, more dialogue and appropriate action, it could have been awesome.  The film is still well done in a sense, but I think the concept was wasted.

I thought I'd leave wanting to get into a car chase, but I just left bewildered.  I thought Ryan Gosling was the s*** after Crazy, Stupid, Love but after his performance in Drive I'm just hoping I can appreciate his future projects, such as The Ides of March without playing this one scene over and over in my head.  Let's just say, if you see Drive you'll understand when I claim that I can never ride in an elevator the same way again.