Modern noir "masterpiece" for the Bay/Bruckheimer Gen

Rating: 7/10 (19 November 2011)

A woman in Michigan recently filed suit against the distributors of Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, claiming the trailer misled her into thinking it was going to be like Fast And The Furious - that there was in fact very little driving in the film. She has my sympathies.
I bought Refn's critically well-received previous effort, Valhalla Rising, on blu-ray expecting something along the lines of The 13th Warrior and instead got an exercise in Viking existentialism so pretentious and excruciatingly tedious I wanted to scratch my eyes out.
Drive also features lots of ponderous staring into space, stretching on into minutes, but this time the payoff is a little more worthwhile.
The professional criminal with a heart of gold trying to set things right caper is scarcely original in westerns and film noir and Refn self-consciously apes from the very best: Point Blank (1965), The Getaway (1972), and Thief (1981).
Opening titles in fluoro pink Mistral over DP Newton Thomas Sigel's highly stylized neon drenched Los Angeles cityscapes combine with Cliff Martinez' poppy and at times icily atmospheric synth washes that conjure up both Tangerine Dream's Thief soundtrack and Giorgio Moroder's music for Scarface (1983) creating a cool Miami Vice 80s vibe.
Refn's use of violence is comparable to David Cronenberg's superb A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007), brutally intense and frighteningly realistic but dealt with quickly, never garish nor gratuitous.
Action sequences are handled with precision. Car chases shot the only way a car chase should be shot, with practical stunt work not computer animation, free of shaky cam, and edited in such a way that, although kinetically super-charged, they remain easy to follow.
The biggest speed bump preventing Drive from overtaking the iconic greats to which Refn aspires is in casting Ryan Gosling in the lead. Gosling is pretty good at chewing a toothpick, but he isn't fit to do up Lee Marvin, Steve McQueen or James Caan's shoelaces – mind you in the new Hollywood, who really is?
Like Valhalla Rising, Drive is attracting more favorable reviews than it probably warrants. One reviewer on here even calls it Citizen Kane meets Taxi Driver! While it's certainly very good, it's hardly "the best of the year" (for me that would be Rise of the Planet of the Apes/Warrior tie and Red Dog) and I can't help but think that if the film had been released back in the day it would have quickly vanished without a trace.