Smack, Crack, Bushwhacked

Drive

*** out of ****

Directed by: Nicolas Winding Refn

Starring: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Oscar Isaac and Albert Brooks

Running time: 100 minutes

In the new pulpy noir Drive, our enigmatic driver protagonist played by Ryan Gosling throttles a Chevy Impala through the dimly lit Los Angeles streets. Like the car, the film looks as conventional as everything else on the road, but has a real roar underneath.

It is a standard action film with stock characters, but the artistic pretensions and slow-burn techniques from Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, who won Best Director honours at Cannes this spring, ensures that the film is a step above the typical genre entry.

The driver that Gosling portrays is not given a name or much of a history. He has three jobs: a professional stunt driver for the movies by day, a getaway driver for inept criminals at night, and an auto repair shop worker on the side (his boss is played by the always-welcome Bryan Cranston).

He has also become attracted to a neighbour, Irene (Carey Mulligan), and enjoys taking her and her son, Benicio (Kaden Leos), on drives along the concrete L.A. River basins. When Irene’s husband (Oscar Isaac) returns from prison and gets mixed up with some shady mobsters—including a wryly funny and shockingly sadistic duo of Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks—the Driver must protect Irene and her son as the mobsters' schemes become increasingly convoluted.

Refn’s film oozes with a self-conscious sense of style, as if it knows it’s the coolest thing in the room. The synth-heavy soundtrack, neon text and the white leather jacket donned by our protagonist—featuring a gold scorpion on its back—scream for the galore of hard-boiled action pictures from the 1980s (Michael Mann's Thief is a good reference point).

The perplexing ambiguity and aimlessness of the protagonist speaks better to action-packed excursions from the late sixties and early seventies, though—think of the films that Steve McQueen and Alain Delon would be suited up for. But since the Driver resembles an action hero character more than a complete and absorbing human being, Drive would rather serve as a fascinating genre exercise than a character study.

Not that that’s a bad thing, especially considering how Refn experiments with the execution of action sequences. He (thankfully) excludes the chaotic frenetic energy that so frequently drowns out coherence in contemporary action cinema, and instead uses a variety of point-of-view shots, rhtyhmic music and tight framings to keep the action throttling forward without having to disorient the viewer.

Mostly, though, the film takes its precious time setting up each brutal murder. This teases the audience as to when the violent impact will finally be heard or seen, adding suspense and ensuring that the audience absorbs the details on the screen as they await the bloodshed.

When the action starts off, the results are nasty and overwhelmingly bloody. In one sequence, the driver shares a passionate kiss with Irene just seconds before stomping on a man’s face to the extent that nothing remains above his neck a minute later.

For a film that basks in a retro coolness and that is classily patient in how it executes pivotal moments of graphic violence, it is a bit shallow. The cast is uniformly excellent, but they can only do so much to make up for paper-thin characterizations, courtesy of screenwriter Hossein Amini (who based his material off of a slim James Sallis yarn). Even Gosling’s calm, knowing stare feels like a bit much to base an action hero off of at certain points.

Don’t go into Drive expecting a fourth Transporter film. Even though its roots in the action genre are apparent, the surprises lie in Refn’s storytelling techniques rather than the story itself. With such capable hands steering the action, the film is a smooth, if remarkably gory, joy ride.