Tag Archives: Ryan Gosling

Drive

After months of anticipation I finally got to see Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive on the weekend.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a really good crime movie at a mainstream multiplex cinema. Maybe Ben Affleck’s The Town, although it went down hill fast whenever it tried to move away from the heist theme and get into the characters.

Drive is not perfect, hell what film is, but it was damn close in my view, certainly up there with the best contemporary crime films I’ve seen.

The movie is very loosely based on the 2005 book of the same name by James Sallis. Ryan Gosling plays ‘Driver’. By day he works as a stuntman and fixes cars in a garage owned by his mentor, Shannon (Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad fame, although he will forever be associated in my mind as the father from Malcolm in the Middle, which for me is what makes him come across as so bent).

Driver’s expertise at what he does is established in the film’s first ten minutes, a fantastic high-speed chase thought the streets of LA scene during which he eludes a police dragnet.

His credo is simple:

“If I drive for you, you get your money. That’s a guarantee. Tell me where we start, where we’re going and where we’re going afterwards, I give you five minutes when you get there.Read more