The Scorpio jacket is cool

DRIVE (2011)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Neo noir has little to no bearing on the black-and-white film noir of post-WW II. Even when films got cooler and maintained a cooler distance as well, such as Lee Marvin in "Point Blank," noir carried that edge of existentialism - a world where there were no heroes and morality was skewed. Neo noir has a cool distance but little of the skewed morality. It is barely existential anymore - more of an ironic distance than even Tarantino's pop culture noir tableaux. "Drive" has cool written all over it and initially shares some of the existential trappings that makes noir what it is. Then it goes off the deep end into shallow, cliched waters that pretty much demolish what precedes it.

Ryan Gosling is the unnamed Driver of the film, a Hollywood stunt car driver and garage mechanic who also lends his talents to being the top getaway driver for criminal activities. In the astoundingly tense and electrifying opening sequence, he helps two robbers escape from the police and a searching helicopter and maneuvers his Chevy vehicle with the ease of an elusive professional. The Driver doesn't have much else going on in his isolated existence, but he does take a liking to a neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan) who has a son and a husband in prison. The Driver helps her when she has car trouble and, for a while, writer-director  Nicolas Winding Refn rivets our attention with strikingly silent poses and body language that speaks volumes. The suspense builds when Irene's husband is out of prison and asks the Driver to help in a pawn shop robbery. Naturally, things go haywire and out-of-control.

"Drive" starts off as such an absorbing tone poem, even more breathtaking than a Michael Mann flick, that I was completely swept away by Gosling and Mulligan. Then we get to some cliched mob business involving Albert Brooks in an atypical and largely miscast role as a mob boss and Ron Perlman with glaringly big white teeth as a henchman, and I suddenly felt I was in some other movie. All manner of restraint and "coolness" erodes in favor of brutal, graphically violent setpieces that pretty much clam up the narrative. Gosling plays a loner, a nobody, but all that remains is a cipher, an automaton. When he starts walking around the last third of the film with a very cool Scorpion jacket full of blood stains, I lost patience. When the Driver stomps on one guy's head repeatedly (bordering on Rob Zombie's hideous violence from his "Halloween" remake) and Irene stands there dumbfounded, I was angry. I am no prude when it comes to violence (Scorsese, Tarantino on occasion, Mann and many others know how to make violence sting and linger without overstating) but this movie goes overboard and is too nasty to resonate with the firm, compelling, restrained tone that sets up the film. Uneven doesn't come close to describing it.

There are many things to admire in "Drive." A couple of the car chase sequences are splendidly made and very kinetic - they astonish and bring back the element of surprise that has dissipated from years of mediocre car-chase flicks. The mood and atmosphere of the film is strikingly photographed, especially the scenes of the city at night. Other pluses include Carey Mulligan as a very delicate wallflower who is hypnotic to watch, Bryan Cranston as a garage mechanic who is in way over his head with the mob boss, and Oscar Issac as Irene's husband who shares a glimmer of wanting to change his life. But the movie and Ryan Gosling (who can do much more than make a zombie stare) are a vaccum blowing us postmodernist shards of better movies (including a lost classic from the 1970's "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry" which has stronger personalities in it than anything in this movie) minus any real moral complexity. "Drive" starts off as a crisply flavored Vodka Martini and ends up as one too many spilled Bloody Marys.