Review of Drive

Drive (I) (2011)
6/10
What was all the fuss about
17 August 2014
Warning: Spoilers
I Saw this movie last night on DVD and I have to say that I did not see what all the fuss was about.

Drive is a decent enough film but not in the same class as "The Driver" with Ryan O Neal which is a more realistic portrayal of someone in this line of work.

Here are some of the issues I had with the the film.

In "Drive" we have a protagonist who is a Stunt Driver, Garage Mechanic & part-time getaway driver. The character has very little dialogue and appears to be a shy loner and at times seems rather cold, and yet he develops a friendship with his neighbour without saying much at all. Then inexplicably he offers to drive for her husband when he is released from prison and beaten up, even though he barely knows the guy. Now we see in the beginning of the film how professional he is when he tells the guys he works for that 5 minutes either side they are on their own, and indeed he leaves the robbers in the parking lot and walks off just as the police arrive and presumably they were arrested. But now we see him put aside this professionalism putting himself in situations that he cannot control and risking himself for strangers. This seems to me to be a complete contradiction of what his character is about.

He shows an extreme naivety when he offers to give back the 1 million thinking he will be out, when most people would know that in the criminal underworld these people depend on others respecting & fearing them, and therefore they will not just say thank you and be done with it.

Then we have the sudden bursts of unnecessary violence, I mean when he noticed the gun in the guys inside pocket in the elevator, he kisses the girl and then attacks the guy slamming him off the wall and when he falls he kicks him and starts stamping on his head more than six times, killing him. Would it not have been easier just to dispossess him of the gun and if need be, shoot him.

Also when the guy comes up to him in the bar, to find out if he would do another job with him, he is unnecessarily nasty when all he needed to say was that "I make it a rule to never work with the same person twice" thats it. It seems to me there is no need to make unnecessary enemies of people.

I noticed quite a lot of people commented that they liked the soundtrack. I found the soundtrack very annoying and to me and at times did not really suit what was playing out on screen.

Finally the car chase sequences were okay but not as good as The Driver, Ronin, No Mans Land, The Bourne movies etc.

So for me at the end of day it was an entertaining but flawed movie which was watchable and interesting, but at the same time I would not really recommend it to most people as it is not really a mainstream film. I would give it a 6.5 out of 10 but I would suggest that anybody who liked this check out The Driver with Ryan O Neal a considerably better film in all respects.
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