All the Elements Were There, but...

Rating: 5/10 (20 September 2013)

With such an impressive cast and a budding director, with such works as the Pusher Trilogy, which was a piece of epic dark edged gripping drama that I won't forget. I must say it left me expecting a lot when Drive came along.
Waiting for the pace to pick up, and for some emotionally gripping performances, i found myself not being able to connect with the characters, with the sound seeming to fill in the exposition for them, giving the acting a lack of breathing space.
Musically, Drive contains some flavors of some of my favorite pieces of music in recent years. The sense of nostalgia with some 80s infused moods were there, with some tastes of 28 Days Later, Risky Business, the Social Network and Miami Vice. I was left utterly confused though why they hadn't sent these songs to a composer to do an original soundtrack instead of making references to other emotional moments in other movies and passing it off as its own. This aspect of the movie seemed totally overlooked.
In terms of acting, some pivotal scenes in the movie ended up coming across a bit flat. Bryan Cranston had an underwritten part that could have been so much more to the drama, while Gosling gave away so little that he seemed a bit unreal to me. Albert Brooks seemed a little miscast in the part. With acting in mind though, I thought Oscar Isaac brought an intensity and tension which lacked in the rest of the movie, while Carey Mulligan was is softer more tender opposite. They were well matched, and they provided the movie with a depth of realism that seemed to lack in other areas.
With all of that in mind though, my expectations were perhaps quite high after Refns earlier work, and I'll be looking into more of his work with anticipation but this one wasn't quite the throttle fueled punch that I was expecting.