Stuck in idle.

Rating: Null/10 (5 November 2011)

This is a movie that aspires to be a great nilhlistic existential thrill ride into oblivion & falls well short of its aims.
But maybe I'm mistaken thinking this film has any aspirations. I kept waiting for "Drive" to rev up & it never really did. It has one pretty cool chase scene & a couple of other OK ones --stuff we've seen done much better in the "Bourne" movies, "The French Connection", "To Live & Die In L.A.", etc. It's like watching "Vanishing Point" never arriving at a point.
"Drive" has none.
The key problem is its lead. Ryan Gosling zombies through it all focused like a cat staring intently at some phantom object that none of us can see except this film's true believers who praise this movie like it's in the same class as "Heat" or "Collateral". There is a scene in which he puts on a rubber mask that has no real facial features & it conveyed the same amount of nuances & emotions that a maskless Gosling had been sharing with us all along.
A big deal has been made out of Albert Brook's turn at villainy. Like just about everything else here, Brook's is okay. (I'll take Paul Reiser's sleazeball in "Aliens" or Robin William's chilling dryness in "Insomnia" way over this.)
I felt bad for Carey Mulligan. Her soft edges never played off Gosling's blankness the way I think they were intended to. It makes me want to watch "Never Let Me Go" again.
And a key part of the soundtrack was lifted directly from last year's Oscar winning score for "The Social Network".
"Drive" steal from a lot of better genre films & it doesn't do it well.