Ryan Gosling, in this film just known as “Driver” is a mysterious guy. He’s an excellent stunt driver who is able to pull off some awesome driving stunts. But in his down time, he’s an excellent getaway driver. If someone hires him, he will pick you up at the scheduled time, and get you away from the crime within a 5 minute window. But Driver meets another resident of his building, lovely Irene (Carey Mulligan) who is a single mom raising her young son. They become friends, and Driver helps her out, only to learn that her husband is in prison and just being released. Her husband is in a bad way, owing money to the mob, and so to free himself and his family from their influences, sets out on a simple robbery with Driver to pick them up, when everything goes wrong. Neither had any idea what a horrible mess they were getting themselves into, and it will try all Driver’s skill to stay one step ahead of everyone who’s after him.

This is actually a very good action film. As you may know, I’m not a fan of speed driving, car stealing films, but this has much more meat to the story than the typical “Gone in 60 Seconds” type of film. Ryan Gosling is a very introverted and shy person in this film who doesn’t speak much. This helps to make him much more mysterious. He’s got a lot going on, getaway driver, auto mechanic, stunt driver, he has a lot of jobs! He’s perfectly cast in this film, and it’s easy to identify with his plight as we go through the film. The rest of the cast is good too. There is plenty of story to go around, and yet there are breathtaking suspenseful car chases that are as good as any I’ve seen. This is an excellent rental for people who love action movies, especially the car chase movies. I can recommend it if you’re in the mood for a good action film.

==Written by Ed Goettman ==

==From: Ed's Review Dot Com (www.edsreview.com)==

Considering its uncommon formal precision and the seemingly effortless grace of its construction, “Drive” doesn’t owe its greatness to Nicolas Winding Refn’s prowess as an action director. It often looks like a summer blockbuster—it was shot sleekly on digital video by Bryan Singer regular Newton Thomas Sigel, and meticulously edited by Refn’s in-house favorite Matt Newman—but ultimately “Drive” represents not an exquisitely constructed action picture but rather the careful and entirely unexpected deconstruction of same. I think I would have enjoyed “Drive” had it gone ahead and embraced its generic framework wholly and seriously—Refn has proven himself more than capable of delivering satisfying action sequences, of which “Drive” has several. But Refn is more interested in thought than in spectacle, and because he chooses to interrogate poses and attitudes rather than simply adopt them, “Drive” transcends the basic elements of its material. Some films are more than the sum of their parts; “Drive” is about the sum of its parts, about the position and angle and functionality of each individual part itself, and this is what makes it great.

This may also account for its relative unpopularity at the box office, as a nuanced arthouse film seems considerably less palatable to a mainstream audience than a more straight-forward genre picture would have been. Its veneer of cool is part of the problem here, I suppose—the poses it strikes from the beginning are immensely seductive, but when it begins to systematically undermine the credibility of those poses, the film sabotages a great deal of its ‘easy’ likability. Ryan Gosling’s nameless protagonist—a Hollywood stunt driver and mechanic by day, he moonlights as the city’s premier getaway driver—opens the film, in the words of a friend, as “the very embodiment of cool,” a collected, reticent professional in the tradition of “Le Samourai's” Jef Costello. But one of the reasons I actually prefer “Drive” to Melville’s moody crime classic is that it has the guts to confront and eventually subvert its own claims to coolness, whereas “Le Samourai” is content to merely ride out the superficial appeal of its surfaces.

Gosling’s Driver, like Alain Delon’s hitman, employs his formidable action-hero talents to dispatch his aggressors, but, unlike Melville, Refn refuses to glorify the ugliness of his methods. When Costello, realizing he’s been set up by the men who’ve hired him for a hit, tracks down and executes his employer, it’s handled as deftly and as cleanly as the hot-wiring of a stolen car. But when the Driver, stuck in an elevator with the love of his life and the mobster sent to kill him, brutally stomps the crook’s head in, it’s depicted as an unsettling act of uncontrollable rage. The Driver here loses all sense of composure, submitting to a psychotic impulse that’s anything but cool or appealing. And the love of his life, for whom his rage was unleashed? She’s appropriately mortified, repulsed—as you’d be, and as we in fact are—by what she’s witnessed, even if she vaguely accepts the reasons. A less critical or considered film could have embellished this violence in a similar manner but to drastically different ends, framing its brutality as dark comedy, shock-horror, or even Zack Synder-style gore-porn. Violence of this sort is relished in mainstream action films all the time; if the violence in “Drive” seems especially shocking or disturbing, it’s because we’re encouraged, surprisingly, to address it as just that. It’s a bold, even commendable turn, and if it’s what cost the film its commercial viability, it’s also what grants it its artistic success.

The film “Drive” most closely resembles in this regard is David Cronenberg’s similarly misunderstood “A History of Violence,” which also sought to complicate assumptions about identity, heroism and violence as they persist in both life and, maybe more importantly, in the cinema. Cronenberg’s strategies were not unlike Refn’s: by grafting frank and often disturbingly violent imagery atop a kind of benign, stylized sentimentalism, the film would problematize its audience’s tendency to relish “action” gestures, preventing them from indulging in it uncritically. (It’s probably no coincidence that while the mindless movie violence examined in both “A History of Violence” and “Drive” could be considered a distinctly American obsession, neither film is directed by an American; it’s as if a distanced look at the subject requires outside eyes.)

The brutal violence which punctuates “Drive” is by this point rather infamous, and much of the criticism directed at the film revolves around the purported crassness of these moments. But to my mind, a film that’s capable of satisfying the requirements of the genre in which its rooted while ultimately subverting and undermining the nature of those requirements is much too self-aware to qualify as crass in that sense. Paul Verhoeven’s American films used to depict violence in a similarly exaggerated but self-consciously critical way, and they were unfairly maligned by most mainstream critics on similar grounds. (It’s always baffled me that anyone, much less an intelligent and attentive critic, could sit through “Robocop” or “Starship Troopers” and conclude that they are “just” genre films rather than knowing satires; I’m similarly confused that “Drive” could be accused of lacking intellectual or emotional depth.) And yet Verhoeven’s American films, though they share “Drive's” action as a vehicle for ideology, lend themselves too easily to ridicule, and have been regrettably reappropriated in recent years as camp favorites to be enjoyed exclusively for their kitschy or conspicuously dated qualities, severely reducing their effectiveness as a satire. “Drive” is a considerably more serious film even on the surface, and that’s why its subversiveness resonates—because we’re encouraged from the outset to engage with it seriously, we’re more effectively floored when its intellectual gears start turning.

Perhaps a more appropriate filmmaker with whom to compare Refn would be David Lynch—not because of any predilection for surreality (though a shot late in the film of the Driver standing before a pizza shop window decked out in a creepy prosthetic head fits that bill, and it’s one of the film’s most memorable images), but because they share an uncommon approach to irony and sentimentality that is, I believe, greatly misunderstood in their work. A common Lynch trope, used often in both “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive” and pretty much the bread and butter of the second season of “Twin Peaks,” is to adopt the look and feel of an anachronistic soap opera and to heavily exaggerate every aspect of the aesthetic. Lynch opts not to emulate any specific soap opera, mind you, but a distant memory of the form; the result usually involves over-saturated colors, unnaturally bright lighting, and saccharine or old-fashioned music that’s deliberately “cheesy” or melodramatic. Refn riffs on this style often, approximating its look and feel across each of the film’s many love scenes, though the visual and aural references to Lynch’s work serve a clear dramatic and emotional function.

The Driver’s love interest, Irene (played angelically by Carey Mulligan), represents the promise of salvation, happiness, and most crucially, redemption, and the introduction of this promise into the Driver’s life establishes the impetus for all of the action which follows. There’s a purity and innocence to this hope, an idealism that the cynicism of the world of streets and gangs and violence would snuff out, and Irene is framed, in stark contrast to anyone else in the film, as an icon of that purity and innocence. The film’s much-celebrated elevator sequence (the one featuring the skull-crushing detailed above) is most memorable to me not for its brief moment of graphic violence, but for the way it contrasts the harsh physicality of that violence with the ethereal beauty and grace of the alternative to violence Irene’s love represents. The set up is the stuff of standard action films: the Driver and Irene step into an elevator, standing beside an ominous looking man we already know is there to kill them. We're granted an obligatory pan up the villain’s side-profile, pausing to note the gun holstered just inside his sports coat.

But the following shot is a revelation, one of the most beautiful shots in recent memory: the Driver extends an arm back toward Irene, pushing her in slow motion to the far corner of the elevator. Here we anticipate violence, but what we’re granted instead is a kiss: the lights in the elevator dim, the couple are lit with what looks like flood lights, Cliff Martinez’s Badalamenti-like score swells—it’s Refn at his most Lynchian, and if its formal qualities feel overtly artificial, the emotional impact is far realer than naturalism would have elicited. The kiss lasts much longer than you’d expect, and thus just long enough that our anticipation for some imminent violence subsides; the brutal violence that does inevitability follow isn’t exactly unexpected—how else could this situation unfold?—but the contrast that’s established between its ugliness and the beauty which precedes it is astoundingly effective all the same. It’s the best thing in the film.

The action which follows moves forward at an increasingly brisk pace, which initially feels like a betrayal of its arthouse sensibility. But, like “A History of Violence” before it, "Drive's" trajectory brings the film closer and closer to the straight-forward adoption of genre poses for a reason. A key moment here arrives as the Driver conspires to confront his principal aggressor, Nino, directly, by waiting outside the pizzeria he employs as his headquarters: returning to the set of the movie on which we earlier saw him work, the Driver retrieves the mask he wore during his stunt work to wear while he hunts down Nino. That the Driver dons a mask modeled after the lead actor in the film for which he’s doing stunts is telling: the Driver is effectively “becoming” an action hero, performing the role of hero, and in its own way the film is “becoming” an action movie, donning the mask of genre. “Drive” is a film all about masks, about shifting appearances and identities, and its descent into the style of a genre film reflects that. The Driver’s “coolness” is just a mask, and it hides sadness, loneliness, a need for love, and, at his most revealing, the capacity for rage. We see surfaces, but there’s more there. The film’s many cinematic references reinforce that point: these are looks to adopt, masks to wear, all of them surfaces hinting at the depths beneath.

==Written by Calum Marsh ==

==From: In Review Online (www.inreviewonline.com)==

Drive may have been one of my most anticipated films of the year. Ryan Gosling has without a doubt been one of this years top stars, and for good reason. Seeing him in the previews for a dark action flick without a doubt had my attention.

The story is quite simple, and honestly isn’t too original compared to other heist movies. Gosling stars as a man with no name, Hollywood stunt drive by day, in-control wheelman by night. He takes on a job that gets him in some hot water with some less than savory characters, all happening at a time where he sees hope that there’s a life outside that of which he has fallen into.

Though the story was fairly disappointing for me, the film made up for it in style. Though set in modern day, It featured an 80s style theme topped with retro sounding electronic music. The cinematography and sound really is stunning in many scenes. Whether its the roar of the engine of a muscle car, a dreamy song playing in the background, it all felt cool and controlled, much like our main character. My only complaint here is that there was just a tad too much of the high-speed slow-motion camera action, something that there has been an abundance of in movies lately.

If you’d be expecting a high-octane and fun action flick, you’d be disappointed. While the film does have its edge-of-your-seat moments, this is a dark and serious film. I admit that I was not expecting the tone the film ended up emitting. There are very few moments where the characters, or the audience for that matter, have a smile on their face. In short, things pretty much all go downhill after the first quarter of the film.

While I had hoped for some more action sequences (what can I say, I’m a testosterone junkie), I still very much enjoyed it despite the borderline-depressive state it left me in. The film was as tragic as it was powerful and quite well done. Gosling really continues to prove himself and his range. One of the only things keeping me from naming it as my favorite film of the year is that I felt there could have been a little more uniqueness to the storyline. Oh, and Ron Pearlman’s character was awful.

==Written by Nicolas ==

==From: Critic Nic (www.criticnic.com)==

Toby Wong (Mark Dacascos) is on a martial arts mission impossible. With a bio-energy module placed in his chest, Toby's awesome martial arts skills are tuned to a super-human level. The only problem is that Toby doesn't want the power. Now, only an army can stop him, and that's just what's hunting him down. As he makes his escape from an ammo-packing posse of hitmen, Toby needs a hostage, Malik (Kadeem Hardison) to drive him to freedom in Los Angeles. It's double-power Jackie Chan-like super moves as the two unlikely heroes face-off with a new advanced killer in this amazing high octane hyper-action movie.