Director: Nicolas Winding Refn
Top stars: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston
Running time: 100 minutes
Drive happened as an impromptu plan to watch a film. It was just Dad and me on a weeknight. On the way to the theatre, I realised that Dad hadn't taken the rating (V/A) too seriously and my mind started echoing 'Yay! He finally knows that I'm a mature film viewer and that I can handle anything.' If he did think that, how wrong he was.
Drive is ridiculously slow in the first hour. Ryan Gosling, whose character's name is never revealed in the film (genius?), has two faces - an absolutely expressionless one and another absolutely expressionless one with a slight upward turn of the corner of his lips. Maybe that's how he succeeds in playing a brooding enigma. The film's editing seems careless. The film score just doesn't fit in some scenes, while the score manages to make certain scenes seem pretty uncanny. The long silences between dialogues, which are probably meaant to be strained and dramatic, are just too long to be anything but frustrating. The slow motion shots were beautiful, I thought, but they get dissolved in the blandness of the rest of the film.
This is the first hour.
The rest of the film is very challenging for me to describe or critique since my eyes were closed most of the time. The plot was finally happening and I was starting to pay attention. Then came the first killing... and it brought with it a lot of blood. I shuddered but relaxed after a few moments. The second killing brought with it much more blood and more brutality. This was viewed through a gap between my fingers. The third killing introduced a cringe-worthy scene of a fork in the eye. I put away my avatar of a film reviewer to clutch my Dad, while shivering and absolutely giving up on the idea of digesting any further popcorn. The murders continued and they just got more bloody and vicious. The scenes jumped because they were censored but the damage was done.
Overall, the plot was too simplistic. The acting was confusing. The film was painfully disturbing for me. I don't know if it was a good film and I wouldn't advise you to find out for yourself, unless your constitution aches and longs for such a genre of films (which involve a fair amount of blood and gore).
I'll be honest with you, reader. I wept when Cedric died in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I've watched The Devil Wears Prada six times with my mum. I secretly like High School Musical 3 (not much of a secret anymore, I guess). I'm not about to become a film (re)viewer who can stomach films such as Drive anytime soon.
PS - Here's a line that you might have been searching for till now. It's about the plot of the film. Drive follows a gifted driver (Ryan Gosling), as a failed heist gets him dangerously involved with ruthless mobsters.
Note from the Editor: I understand that this isn't a review, per se. The film reviewer, Anukripa, feels that she needs to possess a degree of coldness to be poker-faced and serious as a critic. She also feels that she becomes too involved in a film to do so. I, however, believe that reviews such as this one provide an alternate view of the film to you, the reader, so that you know what to expect when you walk into the film theatre. You are always free to check out what other websites say about the film; this is why the More on ... links are included with every review on Which Ice Cream. If you disagree, please leave a comment with your thoughts and Anukripa or myself will respond.
More on Drive: Christian Spotlight, IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Roger Ebert, Metacritic, Wikipedia
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