A Homage to the Walter Hill film

Rating: 7/10 (17 January 2017)

The violence throughout this movie was sudden and visceral - deliberately crafted for maximum shock value. We see driving stunts that defy the audience's credulity if not the laws of physics. In one chase scene the driver flips his car 180 degrees and speeds away in reverse from his pursuer. I would not have believed that remotely possible, had a friend of mine not assured me that Burt Reynolds once performed the exact same stunt; apparently it's difficult to execute safely and extremely hard on a car's transmission, but nonetheless possible. In a later scene we first see the driver rear-end a car and then T-bone it so violently that the car flies upside-down off a sand dune to land on the beach below. Amazingly, having delivered so much kinetic energy to the target car, the front of Ryan Gosling's car seems virtually undamaged and still has both its headlights working! A tank might have performed that stunt, but no car that I've ever heard of. Our hero seems to have a bizarre code of ethics, rather like the Javier Bardem character in "No Country for Old Men". We try to understand what makes him tick and we fail. Ryan Gosling is a much better actor than Ryan O'Neal, but this movie lacks a Bruce Dern bad-cop character.