There’s a lot to like about Drive: we have a hero, a villain, and a running time of about an hour and half. That’s about as long as you really want to hang out with the people you meet in Drive-any longer and one of them will turn around and kill you.
The previews for Drive made it look like a film about a getaway driver, which is why some nutjob sued because there was not that much on the getaway driver front. The opening scenes follow along as our hero drives a getaway car and does a pretty good job of driving slowly and calmly and not drawing any attention to himself. He’s slightly different style of driver than, say, Vin Diesel. And that’s the bulk of the getaway driving.
The rest of the story involves the Terminator style way that our hero kills anyone that he decides needs killing. After we see his softer side, he flirts with a woman and watches Tv with her son, he calmly goes around shooting, knifing, drowning, and stomping bad buys to death. My favorite silly scene has our hero threatening to kill a man in a room filled with mostly naked strippers-they watch with bored expressions and complete disinterest. For the most part this is the tone of the whole film. People are murdered left and right and the bodies are left to rot in the sun-and everyone’s pretty much alright with it. Well, as Arnold said many years ago: They were all Bad Men.
We never learn how the Driver got his mad wheel skills or where he learned to kill Mob Bosses like they were ants under a magnifying glass. We know he doesn’t do it for the money, because he doesn’t care about crap like that.
Drive is profane, hyper-violent, and surprisingly low key when it isn’t shoving a fork into someone’s eye or blowing someone’s brains across the screen. This was a gritty and violent story, but I still miss the old days when gritty and violent films didn’t need to be quite so blood soaked.
