Xan Brooks, Guardian
The mile-o-meter is ticking all the way back to the 1980s on Drive, an existential heist movie that doffs its cap to the back catalogues of Walter Hill, John Carpenter and Michael Mann. Directed with savvy aplomb by the Danish film-maker Nicolas Winding Refn, this plays out under cloudy LA skies and thrums to a narcotic synth-pop soundtrack as it rides shotgun alongside an imperilled Hollywood stuntman. Buckle up; it’s quite a ride…
Refn’s film is playing in the main competition at Cannes, where it is up against the likes of The Tree of Life, Le Havre and The Artist. It can’t win, won’t win and almost certainly shouldn’t win. It’s too self-consciously retro, too much a series of cool, blank surfaces as opposed to a rounded, textured drama. In any case, B-movies like this are rarely geared for victory. They’re the disruptive, disreputable interlopers at the party, pointed towards disaster and doomed to meet a bloody end. The most they can hope for is to go down in a blaze of glory. Drive does, with bells on.
Todd McCarthy, THR
A spasmodically violent, creatively cast and off-center fast-cars-and-crime drama, Drive belongs to a rarified genre subset of stripped down, semi-arty and quasi-existentialist action films that includes Point Blank, Bullitt and The Driver. With Ryan Gosling ably incarnating a pent-up man of few words who goes to great lengths to make one positive gesture in a rotten world, Danish wunderkind Nicolas Winding Refn has fashioned an atmospheric and engaging glorified potboiler that nonetheless seems powered by a half-empty creative tank. Not the sort of film normally seen in the competition at Cannes, this moody and bloody entry should be promotable to good box office results from both discerning and popcorn audiences come September…
The lulls between set pieces tend to be quiet and moody, which dramatically offsets the efficiently executed car chases and the killings that mount up — and become increasing gory — as the bad deeds multiply. The downtime never threatens to become dull, not with this cast nor with Refn’s lively style and the wildly eclectic soundtrack that’s embedded in techno music but extends well beyond it.
All the same, Hossein Amini’s adaptation of James Sallis’s short novel feels more threadbare than bracingly terse; clearly aspiring to the sort spare muscularity in crime writing pioneered by Hemingway in The Killers and subsequently employed by many others. Amini simply doesn’t build enough subtext and layering beneath the surface of the characters and dialogue; the tough talk is simply not loaded way it is in the best noirs, so the lack of resonance is manifest…
So it’s a fun, if not exhilarating, ride, one sped along with the help of a wonderfully assembled cast.
