DVD REVIEW: Drive

Before I properly start this review, I have a little bit of a confession.

I'm really bad for watching DVDs properly. Terrible in fact. I'm really useless because I usually like watching a DVD in parts; pausing it for when I have suddenly thought of something else I need to do, pausing it because I have to go somewhere else or simply pausing it so I can come back to it later. It's almost like I want to watch the film like a TV show in small chunks rather than as a whole.

However, I didn't do that with Drive. It literally grabbed me from the beginning and I didn't stop it until the credits finished rolling.

I do need to say though that I can really see Drive as a love it or hate it kind of film. It's definitely more niche than a lot of films and requires a lot of patience from it's audience. Going by the title and poster alone, you would be forgiven if you were expecting to see an all-action, fast paced action/thriller with some rather extensive car chases. Drive just isn't really that.

Think more like Deathproof and you are halfway there. While Deathproof relied on intriguing characters and witty dialogue to keep the audiences' interest, Drive prefers to weave a drama storyline that focuses on the troubled neighbours of the main character (played by Ryan Gosling), mixed with some low-key american gangster style heist films and finally peppered with a couple of brilliant car chases.

While the film does a bit of a 180 in the middle and suddenly decides to up the gore ante by about 100 times more than the first half of the film, I think it works really well. Gosling's character is introduced to us as a bit of a loner who keeps to himself. We don't know much about him and we are never told much by the end of the film either. We know that he is a Hollywood stunt driver during the day and a heist driver by night, but that's about it - we don't know any of his past at all. And it works, it really does. The long brooding looks to other characters just serves to remind us that we are still working out who this guy is along with everyone else.

Now, I mentioned the gore because it's almost like it's a character trait of Gosling. He can fight... he can definitely fight and it gets rather messy in the process. It's almost like a shock to us as the audience as it comes out of nowhere and just further proves to us that we don't actually know our protagonist very well.

The soundtrack was also mesmerising. It literally had me transfixed at some points and the choice of song played over the revenge at the end was almost perfect.

The only criticism that I can really say is that the film was kind of predictable. There was one shock half way through the film that I didn't see coming and was the plot point that actually kick started the film into becoming a revenge flick. However, everything else after that was a bit paint-by-numbers. We know who the bad guys are and it almost becomes routine when each one of them are sent off to try and get the money back from Gosling but they are then soon dispatched of quickly.

This really is just a minor quibble though, because like I said, the film is just so mesmerising and beautifully shot that I can almost forgive the slightly predictable plot. After all, don't we watch and choose films because we want to watch something we are familiar with?

Otherwise, why would the local Blockbuster be split into genre sections?!

**** 1/2 / *****