Drive (2011)
Some heroes are real.
I sometimes wonder if I dream of the future. The vividness with which I can recall doing a review for a movie - down to the images I choose to use for the screen caps - is bizarre at best considering how averagely worthless my memory proves to be. Well, if my sleeping self can see the future, I’d certianly appreciate some winning lotto numbers so I could come into some good money with minimal effort. Tonight we hop into the car of easy money as well - although it’s only easy if your getaway guy is good. Better watch you watch, whether you are there on time or not this guy is gonna Drive.
Our plot is what you might expect if you’ve seen this kind of movie before - largely a crime-style drama flick. Guy has a day job, moonlights as a professional getaway driver occasionally and is pretty darn good at it. Meets up with a lady, boss at work comes up with a great plan to get into racing, and all seems like it’s good. Well, up until it isn’t. Of course the forced entry back into a crime job that may or may not be wanted for a semi-good reason, and the eventual pile up of the universe taking every single turn it can to make things go wrong. Perhaps some problems can’t be driven away from.
Actors do a good job here. When the dynamic is calling for a comfortable happiness it’s there - amongst the group even. It’s a bit of a good thing because the crime sprees are very limited - this is much more a drama then it is some super high-octane racing movie. Actually, in that way it’s a lot like other heist movies out there - get your angle, be it laughs or story or acting, and knock it out of the park since that’s going to be the main thing time is spent on over the actual crime bits. The lead is a likeable fellow, even if he has a perhaps shady hobby. The neighbor family and him have a good dynamic, and the crime side of it isn’t too crazily over blown in time on screen or in the people in it. That said, by the end things get pretty serious, so even if an actor might seem a little goofy towards the front end they mellow out pretty good.
Part of that is because it’s called for with the characters. Our leads ability to be seemingly calm and collected even when doing something absolutely brutal might be off-putting for some, but it feels right as far as the character goes. Given the actors nailing what’s called for by the characters, it makes them both feel probably far better than what they might actually be. For example - our lead comes out feeling like maybe he learned something emotionally, even if he doesn’t seem like he’s suddenly on a completely different journey in life at the end. Still, I think there’s enough to the characters that folks will still enjoy the drama element of the movie and not feel too bored or distracted during the slower moments of building those characters and the eventual situation up.
Nightcall
I’m not a car guy, so if the cars are really cool or not is lost on me - but there’s a decent number of them here, and although they don’t generally do anything too outrageous there’s still moments of some stunts in there - at least in part because they made the lead also do some work as a car stunt guy. Costumes are enough to give the main at least a distinct look about him, but nothing that’s really breaking the real world modern-style immersion. People look like expected, largely act like expected, and until the end nothing really even starts blowing up the effects department. Folks looking for that sort of thing are going to have to stick around to the end - the drama does all the lifting until that point with a tease or two of car maneuvers. Settings are also suitably modern, but it at least has a decent variety to help visually keep things from just feeling super confined in locations - although like it’s name, there is a lot of sitting in cars going on here too.
Probably my favorite part - not to knock on the story or actors or anything - is the soundtrack. When you start off with some synth-y sounds and then throw right into a Kavinsky banger, you could probably rightfully assume I’d be on board. Yes, I know of Kavinsky from before seeing this movie, so it’s a classic (or at least probably is) situation of prior-knowledge coating the retaining factor. Probably not quite old enough to be considered nostalgia, Also in lines with audio, the actors deliver lines fine, things are well balanced, and i think the only problem is one of those “you are thinking too hard about a movie” situations where I was told a car wouldn’t sound like that doing the corners it was doing. Again, I’m not a gearhead and cars to me are just a ways of travel, so I couldn’t speak one way or the other, but someone did bring it up so I should probably point it out right?
Thinking man stuff time! It’s a drama, so you know there is plenty of stuff in here of varied levels of depth that you could dig with your mental shovel for. Family dynamics, second chances, and what would you do for your family? Yeah, that stuff is in there and funnily enough technically all side-character stuff. Adrenaline junkies and how it could lead to doing bad stuff like crime? Sure thing. Doing bad things for a good reason? You know people pick that moral quandary apart all the time already. There probably is more than that in here too, but I was too distracted by the synthwave tunes to really pay full attention to something I’m already pretty arguably bad at digging up in the first place.
Happy moments in long straights
It’s a good movie. Yeah, it gets perhaps a tad violent for some folks at the end, but it’s got some stuff for the action folks and the thinking folks - although most those crime related action elements are more bookends to the movie then they are steady throughout. It has a few stories that tie into each other well enough, was shot nice and put together nice, has some actors doing pretty darn good - and has a bunch of cars and being in cars. I think that’s probably a pretty important part for a movie named drive, although I guess it could also be a reference to the drive for a character and how committed they are to a course of actions, which is also fitting enough for this movie.