A Porsche of a cast, driven into a brick wall

Rating: 4/10 (10 July 2016)

These days, it's pretty easy to put lipstick on a pig in Hollywood. Get a great DoP, which Newton Thomas Sigel is, and it'll look fantastic. Assemble a bunch of great actors, which this film has, and they'll make you feel some emotion. But at the end of the day, this is a squealing pig of a film, and the fault lies almost entirely with the script.
I'm not going to mince words: this is a terrible script. One can't help feel that it was written by a 15-year-old kid who'd seen a few movies and thought, "Hey, I can do that!" And this was his first go.
Without giving anything away, Gosling's character is a tough-guy stunt driver who moonlights as a tough-guy heist driver who—by some "unexpected" twist of fate— gets himself mixed up with the wrong guys and has to drive his way out of it. He's a man of few words, largely because the writer of the script couldn't come up with an interesting piece of dialogue if his life depended on it. And we're meant, I suppose, to care about his fate.
Now, a bad script coming out of Hollywood wouldn't mean much were there not such a stellar cast involved. There's not a bad actor in the bunch, and a couple of them are amongst the best around (Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan). What a terrible waste, the banal lines coming out of these talented mouths.
Of course, it's Hollywood and so long as there's a lot of violence and a love interest, it checks the boxes, right? Not exactly. First of all, you have to care about the characters —not because they're cute and appear to be attracted to each other or because there's a gun pointed at them, but because they are real and honest human beings. There is simply zero honesty here.
On top of all this, the soundtrack is inane. The style was seemingly chosen because the director either really liked '80s movies like "Beverly Hills Cop" or believed a music director who told him "the '80s are coming back" and using '80s-style music would be hip. It was certainly a conscious choice, since the type matches the '80s theme. But why? Was the movie set in the '80s? No. Was there a character who was obsessed with the '80s? No.
And that sort of sums up "Drive." Why? Why does it exist? Even were you to say, "Don't look so deep, it's a pure piece of catharsis," before you can experience catharsis, you still need to develop characters you give a damn about. And frankly, I feel a bit cheated.