Enough with all the puns, this movie is only half as good as everybody says.

Rating: 5/10 (30 September 2011)

"Drive" is a movie with lots of potential, akin to, say, "Stay". Both movies have brilliant cinematography and actually a bit of thought to them as well. Yet both are very weak in terms of story, "Stay" more so than "Drive", the last one being only marginally better in this department.
I am honestly baffled by the almost universal praise this movie has gotten as of late. Sure it's a piece of art, once again very close to "Stay". It's very moody, again like the aforementioned film. "Stay", however, has only a very moderate score of ~7/10 here and 41/100 on metacritic, whilst "Drive" enjoys a 8.5 and 79 respectably.
Now, tell me, why is that? Both movies are almost identical. Alright, I shall admit: "Drive" has some very intense scenes, but on the other hand there are scenes upon scenes where nothing happens, nothing.
Ryan Gosling plays essentially the same character he had been playing for years now. It seems like Keanu Reeves finally met his match in a nil-emotion contest. I can't say he wasn't a good cast, however. He's very creepy and intimidating at times. So I guess a theorem about a clock being right twice a day worked here after all.
The storyline is very predictable and banal, apart from one small detail I couldn't see a mile away.
I said earlier that it was a kind of an opportunity missed. Apart from the first ten minutes, some action scenes and some occasionally intense interplays between the characters, this movie is really not that interesting.
Movie directors should realize that movies are story foremost and art second. Films are not poetry, films are not paintings. Cinema is close to literature in this regard: narrative is everything. Sadly enough Nicolas Winding Refn couldn't see that. I can recommend it, for the atmosphere, but it could've... no, scrap that: it should have been so much more.