Certainly not the kind of film that I expected, at first glance from the trailer and posters that surrounded my local cinema you would think this was a 'fast paced action packed guy gets the girl' kind of affair.
You couldn’t be more wrong.
What we are delivered here is a paced, even thoughtful perhaps, dark noir style kind of film which takes its time over every scene, line & performance, delivering a pretty wonderful (at times tense) overall mood.
We are introduced to our protagonist, the driver (Ryan Gosling), getaway driver by night, the best in town, and by day a stunt car driver. He also helps out in a local garage headed up by nice man / crook Shannon (Bryan Cranston, from Malcolm in the Middle fame).
For our opening scene we are given an arial shot of the vast beautiful sights of Los Angeles (and continue to throughout the film), while our driver is currently in the midst of one of his robberies. Cool as a cucumber he navigates his way round the city avoiding police cars and helicopters with total ease.
He meets Irene (Carey Mulligan) who lives next door to him, a friendship blooms and when her husband returns from jail, still mixed up in a lot of nastiness, our driver offers a helping hand only for it all to go pear shaped (and standard mob stuff ensues).
At this point the film changes direction getting more gruesome, with some incredibly bloody moments that had me crying out, ‘ooh, ah. Shit me that looks painful!’ soon the driver is fighting fires from all directions and doing a damn good job of it too.
I really can’t make my bloody mind up about this one though! On the one hand its uber cool look and feel sucked me in as well as some stellar acting, and I know this is going to sound a bit strange, but there's some cracking violence too.
But on the other I had trouble believing certain aspects of the story be honest, there certainly felt like there were a few holes. As the critic in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/sep/22/drive-ryan-gosling-film-review explains (in regards to just one of the holes) as part of his 'drivers rule' he will only hang around for 5 mins once the robbery kicks off, when this 5 mins is up he’s off no matter what state the job is in! What is the point of a getaway driver that buggers off after 5mins?? No matter what a dab hand he is.
I don't suppose people will give two hoots though, certainly if you've got Mr Gosling behind your wheel.
7 northern thumbs out of ten (just),
