Boring Drive fails to maintain decent speed.

Rating: 5/10 (29 September 2011)

This sluggish piece of neo noir featuring a protagonist (Ryan Gosling) in a constant state of comatose cool who assists in LA heists will have you wanting to get out after a couple of miles as it cruises into the slow lane of mawkish pretentiousness after the first twenty minutes. Other than a couple of taut car chases this lemon has to depend on some vivid gratuitous violence to keep the audience awake as it careens out of control.
Gosling is Driver (what else?) who beyond giving instructions is a mostly mute dour fellow who looks in need of a good sleep. He don't carry artillery he just drives. Don't get him mad though.
The story is needlessly convoluted with Driver becoming involved with the girl and her kid next door whose paroled husband is forced into pulling off a job involving mob money of the same shadowy characters that bankroll a race car (did I tell you he has sure thing Nascar driver promise? ) as well as his loyal buddy who employs him who wouldn't you know it is also involved in the heist that's really a scam to cheat the East Coast mob.
Director Nicholas Winding Redfn opens Drive with a sharply edited tense nighttime LA heist raising the tempo to a high pitch almost immediately. But by the time the opening credits finish Redfn begins to stumble with awkward clumsily paced scenes filled with pregnant pauses and pallid posing in the dark by all concerned. Redfn moves his camera without purpose and when he does frame a composition well he lets it linger to a point of tedium. Making matters even more heavy handed are a soundtrack and music score (Cliff Martinez gets the blame) barging its way through nearly every scene of insipid gravity reinforcing ad nausea its tough guy stance to a point of unintentional parody.
Performances are uniformly zombie led by Gosling, a clueless Carey Mulligan as the drab, conflicted love interest and Albert Brooks with his usual flat lifeless affect as a surly hood looking heavily medicated. Bryan Cranston as Driver's boss delivers somewhat but the script will only let him expand on his role to a limited degree lacking the depth to make him or anyone else for that matter absorbing or even mildly interesting. Drive is one long meandering ride of strained seriousness. Better you should walk.