Drive catches him in the role of confident tourist, immersing himself in the torpid atmosphere of southern California. Refn made his name with the Pusher trilogy and ran wild with the Vikings on last year's Valhalla Rising. Now Driver is on the run, with a bag of loot in the trunk of his car and a pair of gangsters (performed with gusto by Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks) tailgating right behind. Inevitably the heist goes horribly wrong. Irene has an ex-con, almost-ex-husband called Standard (Oscar Isaac) who needs to perform one last job in order to pay off his debts and care for his family. Then one day he shares a lift with his neighbour Irene (Carey Mulligan, playing pensive) and runs clean off the road. Driver, we soon come to realise, is an American riff on Jean-Pierre Melville's solitary samourai, smiling and serene, his moral compass set to neutral. Ryan Gosling stars as Driver, who flips cars for a living and occasionally moonlights as a getaway man for jewel thieves and bank robbers, offering them five minutes of his time, after which they're on their own. Directed with savvy aplomb by the Danish film-maker Nicolas Winding Refn, this plays out under cloudy LA skies and thrums to a narcotic synth-pop soundtrack as it rides shotgun alongside an imperilled Hollywood stuntman. T he mile-o-meter is ticking all the way back to the 1980s on Drive, an existential heist movie that doffs its cap to the back catalogues of Walter Hill, John Carpenter and Michael Mann.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |