Trying to be something it's not - an insult to the greats.

Rating: 4/10 (4 November 2011)

You enter the movie, excited for 2011's attempt at 'Reservoir Dogs' or 'Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels'. You know it's going to be violent, but you expect that to add to the story, rather than taking away from it.
Gosling plays a jaded stuntman, with an interesting but normal enough profession, but in a day he transforms into a cold blooded psychosomatic killer for a helpless woman whom he barely knows, without any emotional distress whatsoever. Stamping people's heads in, breaking hands with hammers; Gosling spends the whole movie drenched in blood and with a singular facial expression. To say that it is unbelievable would be the understatement of the century.
The rest of the actors are dreadfully cast, Bryan Cranston plays a helpless mechanic whose only purpose is to die a gruesome death. Carey Mulligan is a helpless (and I mean really helpless) female character who waits idly for a mysterious and overtly goodlooking man to solve her problems. Albert Brooks begins to be interesting when the story tries to explain that even the upper-middle class can be gruesome. Just as I was starting to like him, he stabs a fork in one of his suboordinate's eyes and slits his throat, just to justify the line "now you have to clean up after me".
Those one-liners are great in Die Hard 4 and other jam-packed action movies where you are watching it just for the explosions, but in a psychological thriller it becomes cliché and over the top. In fact the biggest problem with this movie is it didn't manage to correctly find a place for it's violence. There is enjoyable gore for the heck of it, see 'Hobo with a shotgun' for an example, and there is well placed and clever gore which you find in some of the better Tarantino movies or 'the clockwork orange' etc. This movie is somewhere in the middle, with sickening images clearly without purple, a sad attempt at reeling in an audience who want to seem both sophisticated but are really there for the explosion.
Overall Drive is not a great movie, and it's sad attempts to look like one just make the production all the more embarrassing.