Drive away from this one

Rating: 1/10 (4 March 2014)

After I have watched a film I usually have a guess at what the IMDb rating is before logging on, and, taking into account that every film has people who love it and people who despise it, my guesses are usually pretty accurate, often spot on. Drive is the first film where I was way out: I predicted a generous 5.4 and was astonished to see 7.9! It does seem that many people have mistaken long dull scenes where nothing happens (eg a car drives along a road in a town with little traffic, we see the windscreen view of it driving along, crossing some traffic lights, then carrying on down the road, then driving along for a bit more, all in silence, then after a while we suddenly cut to the next scene) for art-house creativity. I would call it 'let-down' filming: you watch the scene because you assume a bad-guy car is going to come racing out of a sidestreet and launch into a chase so you are a little on edge, but nothing happens so you just think 'eh? what was the point of that?'.
Now, the acting. Albert Brooks was good, Bryan Cranston did the best he could with the material, but the rest of them.... I am sure Ryan Gosling is usually a fine actor but here he had two facial expressions: Blank Stare and Slow Annoying Grin. But worse than all of that was what all the other negative reviews have mentioned: the silence.
If someone asks you a question, in real life the human race generally gets along by giving some sort of answer, even if it is a mumble. If you walk into your place of employment and your boss and friend who has given you a job for the last 6 years sees you and says "How yer doin', kid?' I would expect you to reply 'fine thanks', or something similar. Here though, our man says nothing. So the boss rambles on, hands him the keys to a car, tells him about the car etc etc, while our man takes the keys and gets in, continuing to say nothing. Is that even remotely realistic? Apart from anything else it is just rude.
And so it goes on, all through the film. Questions answered with a stare. Some questions rewarded with a short comment, but only after a long silence during which a slow look at the floor then back up again is all the viewer can enjoy. Everyone seems to accept this behaviour as normal and just go on to ask another question or smile quizzically back but in the real world someone would have punched his lights out long ago. He was driving me mad, I actually found myself shouting "Say something, dammit!" at the screen, in a vain attempt to move things along a bit.
Talking of driving, there wasn't much of it in the film despite the title. The violence was contrived to make it more shocking than it needed to be, Ron Perlman's character swore uncontrollably for no reason other than make him sound like the Big Gangster even though there are far more effective ways of getting this across, and the whole plot just seemed unlikely. Yes, I know it is fiction so sometimes you must suspend belief but you have to be able to connect with what you are watching and in this case I couldn't. For example, a man watches another man drive unremarkably around a circuit for a while and this convinces him to invest $300,000 in the man to race cars? The same man decides that the best way to kill a petty crook who hasn't done him any harm is not to use a knife, but first select the fork to inflict some light torture, then go back for the knife? Our driver puts his foot down in a 300bhp car but all the cars around it seem to continue to be going at the same speed; at the end he leaves all the money behind, he is also impervious to a serious and deep stab wound.... and so on. It all seemed a bit weak in the 'believability' department.
When another reviewer said they should have put an 'l' at the end of the title they weren't far wrong. To all those who think this is a wonderful film, count up the number of people like me who don't normally write reviews but felt compelled to do so in order to give it one star, we can't all be philistines who don't appreciate a good film when we see one. There are better films out there, there really are.