Stuck in neutral

Rating: Null/10 (3 October 2011)

I sort of know where they wanted to go but they didn't quite make it out of the drive way. This is the story of a stunt driver with no name who also drives for stick up jobs. He has a little set piece he tells his clients about how he's just there for the drive, they have five minutes and for five minutes he's theirs. It's the most he speaks the entire show. Usually he just stands around with a slightly retarded smirk on his face. Life changes when his equally vocally challenged neighbour strays into his line of vision. Her hubby is in jail -- but hey whoa gets out after our two leads have spent a few hours staring at each other -- and she has an adorable and wonderfully articulate young child who also seems to fall under the spell of the mute driver. The owner of the garage where the driver with no name works when he's not stunt driving or heist or staring at his neighbour makes a deal with some low level criminal players to finance a race car that will be driven by reticent hero (seems like when you give up speaking you have tons of time on your hands, he's also a killer ninja).
So far I've just set things up and if you still want to watch it, go ahead and stop reading because here's the spoiler. Turns out the neighbours' hubby bought protection while in jail and now has to do a job for the criminal who are financing the race car for our unintelligible protagonist — like, what are the odds? So our nameless driver volunteers to do the driving but something goes wrong, or right, not sure because it's never explained. A second car shows up at the heist of a pawn shop in the valley and the neighbours better half is shot and the driver chased. The driver seeks refuge in a hotel where he grills the surviving heister about what the hell just happened. She doesn't seem to know. The rest of the show drags on with the minutia of exchanging the stolen money — a million dollars so you know that was no ordinary pawn shop — for the life of the neighbour.
Really, the whole thing could have been done in a half hour, the director has confused extreme nihilism and slow pace for something many of my fellow reviewers are calling art. The motivations are non-existent the characterizations facile. A fine cast is totally wasted. Poor Carey Mulligan, so wonderful in "An Education", has nothing to do in this movie. Three of my favourite TV actors, Bryan Cranson, Christina Hendricks and Ron Perlman are shamefully under-utilized with Hendricks and Perlman barely having any screen time at all. Ryan Gosling plays the role with an embarrassed smirk on his face that seems to suggest he has just silently farted and is hoping no-one noticed.
For all the reviewers saying that this is a great film and people who disagree don't know movies, here's my problem — "Gone with the Wind" is IMDb rated at 8.2 and "Drive" is rated at 8.5