Review of Drive (2011) by Mikete — 03 Oct 2011

I, like many others, joined just to review this movie. I have to say I love movies. I love arthouse movies. This movie was not too wierd or "arts-y" for me. The reason for the low score is that it is genuinely awful.

I would have given it a 0, but the opening scene is very good, and I liked one other scene. Apart from that, I see absolutely nothing redeeming about Drive. The protagonist is an antisocial personality-vacuum.

The love interest and her son are cute but ornamental. The two mob villains are ham-fisted and cliched to a point beyond parody. The audience is given no reason to emotionally invest in the well-being of any characters.

There is not a germ of realism in the tacky, tv-movie script. All of which could serve to reinforce the mythology, if that's what this movie is after, but the archetypes aren't strong enough, and the story arc not epic enough to sustain a myth.

And, to top it all off, amid all the clumsy writing and un-reality of the script, the filmmakers practically beg to be taken seriously with overlong dramatic pauses and hyper-graphic depictions of violence.

It is a superficial, nihilistic, cynical exercise in vanity that seems to want to be taken as deep. It's terrible.