Los Angeles. The Driver works part-time as a stunt driver for movies, and part-time as a gateaway driver who gives criminals 5 minutes to rob a place and get back into his car, before he evacuates them safely from the incoming police. His mentor is the car mechanic Shannon, who initiates a partnership with Jewish mobster Bernie and his collegue Nino, who run a pizza store. The Driver falls in love with Irene, mother of a little boy, and decides to help her recently released husband Standard into getting out of a debt for gagnster Cook. The robbery of a pawnshop gets the Driver a million $, but Standard is shot and killed. It turns out Nino arranged for a parallel robbery of the million $ because it belonged to a rival mobster who wanted to open up a rival business. Bernie orders that everyone must be killed who know of the operation. When Shannon is killed, the Driver kills Bernie and leaves the money with the corpse, but is wounded by a knife himself.
"Drive" is a good action-crime film about a gateaway driver that works in the first half, but is still overshadowed by Wright’s similar "Baby Driver" released six years later, which works in its both halves. This film builds a delightful mood in the first half thanks to several great shot compositions and camera drives, creating an aesthetic, somber, minimalist story that initially relies on sophistication, whereas Ryan Gosling is effective as the nameless driver, and comedian Albert Brooks surprises as the ruthless mobster Bernie. Unfortunately, the second half dissolves those efforts, finishing the last act only in the always same, banal ways of gangsters killing the protagonist’s friends, and then the protagonist killing gangsters, again and again, with disturbing outbursts of sudden violence (the slow-motion of a person's head being blown up from a gunshot), until the movie just becomes a depiction of two sides trying to outslaughter each other. A little more finesse, intricate plotting or creativity was expected from the authors, since such a predictably bloody outcome was already seen a hundred times already.
Grade:++
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