An overwhelming movie with a subtle undertone

Rating: 7/10 (10 October 2011)

If taken at face value, Drive can seem overwhelming to most people and leave one with a nauseous feeling at the end. Drive is indeed an incredibly bloody movie, however, it is not very hard to come away from watching this with a feeling that maybe all this completely wrong? Sometimes, to provide a critique of something, one only needs to present the thing in all its reality and the critique appears all of its own. This can be said of the latest movies from the likes of Tarantino, in whose movies, blood and gore are pretty much the order of the day.
In Drive, Ryan Gosling provides an average, unemotional performance as the anti-hero: he is a sociopathic young part-time criminal who gets into a "contract" to commit a crime to help a neighbor's ex-con husband and realizes that the "contract" has more than what appears on the surface. Carey Mulligan, in my opinion, proves to be the saving grace in a movie whose characters all appear to be stereotypes and provide mostly average or poor performances. In scenes where she meets Gosling for the first times, she provides a real on screen charisma and chemistry similar to the performance provided by Gosling and Michelle Williams (whom Mulligan uncannily resembles) in Blue Valentine. Though Drive does not get onto the level of Blue Valentine's sublime story lines and acting, taken from the perspective of just this pair of actors, this movie is a very good successor to Blue Valentine, providing what might very well be the next tragic stage in the lives of Dean Pereira and Cindy Heller.