September 16, 2011

Drive - 2011

Director: Nicholas Winding Refn
Writer: Hossein Amini
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman

"If I drive for you, you give me a time and a place. I give you a five-minute window; anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours, no matter what. One minute in either direction, and you're on your own. I don't sit in while you're running it down; I don't carry a gun... I drive." A Hollywood stunt driver (Gosling) moonlighting as a getaway driver finds himself in over his head after driving a job for the recently unincarcerated boyfriend of a new neighbor (Mulligan).

This film is what every action movie should aspire to be. It doesn't have to be all mindless action and explosions in lieu of a storyline. Refn proves after all these years that he can direct someone else's script just as well as he can his own, and what a script it is! Not only that, but the cast is dynamite, mostly the ones acting outside their normal range (Brooks playing the heavy, Gosling not being a pretty boy, etc.). About an hour into it, things abruptly get very violent, but in the end it's very much an "arthouse action" film, far from what many typical fans of the genre would expect. A+

Oh, and don't confuse this with Drive Angry. Please.

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