Boring, long, annoying, and too stupid to live

Rating: 4/10 (19 September 2011)

First the good: Drive is cast with excellent actors. Now for the bad. Based on this picture you would not know that most of the cast could act at all. Gosling's performance makes wooden seem lifelike. This must be due to direction because Gosling has been in several recent pictures and has acted up a storm in all of them. Gosling, Mulligan, Cranston, Brooks, and Hendricks are all interesting, accomplished actors. My question is: how did they get sucked into this horrible picture? Either the script that was shot was different from the script they read, or they had guns pointed at their heads.
Every plot element of Drive was so unrealistic that I found it impossible to suspend belief. The characters are equally unbelievable. Less than an hour into the picture I knew how it would end. The only question was whether Gosling's character would survive, but by that point I didn't care. All the characters were too stupid to live. Violence has its place in film, but it is not a substitute for characters, a plot, and a story even when the stupid are getting their just deserts.
Nothing in this picture hasn't been well done in other movies. Drive is derivative of Layer Cake, for example. If you want to see what Drive was trying to be, rent Layer Cake.