Drive (2011)
“Drive” (2011) was easily the best (worst?) example of a bait-and-switch movie.
The tagline stated that Driver (Ryan Gosling) was a stunt driver in L.A. who moonlit as a getaway driver for criminals.
That sounds like a cool premise for a movie - it immediately stood out as the kind of flick where I expected to see a lot of impressive driving; a couple chases, maybe a jump or two as Driver applied his stunt skills to actual escapes.
Nope.
Instead we saw Driver do one stunt on set, then do one and a half car chases, then kill a lot of people.
The movie opened with Driver working one of his getaway stunts, with his boss Shannon (Bryan Cranston) handing him the keys to a mid-90s Chevy Impala. At the end of the getaway, Driver just left the car in a parking lot and walked off.
During the movie, Shannon made it clear he was in some not-great financial straits, so where did he get the cash to just throw away a car like that? Presumably Driver got paid for the job, but to pay him a cut worth it to be a driver and to cover the cost of a car that would get dumped seems like it would be a pretty big chunk of whatever you just stole.
Anyway:
Driver lived in an average apartment, down the hall from Irene (Carey Mulligan), a single mother with a son, Benicio, who’s father was in jail. In fact, that’s how Irene referenced the boy’s father, as “his father,” not “my husband,” which set up a very specific meaning about the man.
There were a bunch of scenes of Driver helping Irene, doing chores around her apartment, carrying up the groceries, helping her with her car, etc. Maybe that was supposed to be a montage showing that they spent months hanging out, but it ended up looking like four days. A week, tops.
And every time Driver spoke to Irene, he was silent for too long before talking.
Repeatedly, Irene would ask a question and Driver would simply look at her with his puppy-love face while she waited for a reply. Easily 10 seconds of silence waiting for Driver to say something, and when he did, it was always a simple answer. Nothing profound, deep, or meaningful. Just a short, stupid little answer that never accounted for his silence.
I think the director was trying to recapture the ‘Gosling romance’ thing from “The Notebook” (2004), but as Irene existed with zero character agency and Driver wasn’t interesting, the hope for a romantic angle flopped hard.
At one point Shannon said that Driver asked for a job at his body shop years ago and never wanted to talk about where he came from. I think that was supposed to come across as ‘mysterious and telling,’ as if he had a dark background that he was trying to escape and/or ignore, like “Taken” (2008) or “The Equalizer” (2014), but because Driver spoke so little and never talked about any part of his background, it became too vague of a reference to give credit to the idea that he had any particular set of skills. For all we know, he ran away from an abusive home, or he went AWOL from the military and was keeping his head down, or was just some milquetoast loser with the personality of milk and toast.
And this ‘nothing to say’ shtick meant that Driver was frustratingly silent with everyone, not just Irene.
Not the “cool, silent type” like Han Solo. More like the “socially awkward, doesn’t know how to talk to people” type.
When Irene’s husband, Standard (Oscar Issac) got out of jail and met Driver, Standard asked Driver if he’d been helping Irene around the house. Driver simply stood there with his stupid half-smile and stayed silent for far too long before saying “yep.”
If you’re the type of person who liked annotating books in high school English, you’d probably try to read between the lines and claim that Driver’s pause was him thinking of all of the good memories he had of helping Irene around the house, or paling around with Irene’s son, Benicio.
For us normal people, it just came across as Driver being incredibly condescending. It would have been less insulting for him to scoff and say “Yeah, I’ve been doing the things for your wife that a husband should have done” and then mimicked dropping a mic and walking away.
To add to my frustration with this movie, we never learned what crime Standard committed that put him in jail. Weed possession? Murder? Arson? Your guess is as good as mine!
As Standard was a Latino man, any small court case that a white person would have gotten away with a slap on the wrist could possibly have turned into a much harsher jail sentence for him as a POC. Or it really could have been something massive, but again: no information.
Like Driver’s background, there were vague references to what Standard did N-years ago, but by being so cagey with actual details, the mystery was just mushy and useless instead of any kind of tantalizing.
It turned out that Standard had a ‘debt’ to pay to the New York mob, who had decided to start a crime colony in L.A., for some reason. Driver agreed to help Standard with one last gig to get him out of that debt, which it turned out was a frame job to get rid of Standard once and for all. With bullets.
And because Driver was the getaway driver, he became a target to get offed too, so there would be no survivors to report what happened.
Oh, and Blanche (Christina Hendricks) was there, a woman who’s job it was to simply exist, then die.
She was in one scene where the robbery was discussed, helped drag out a duffle-bag full of cash, and then died violently. That’s it. That’s all they wanted Hendricks for.
When this was made in 2011, “Mad Men” (2007-2015) was halfway through it’s run and Hendricks played the relatively important supporting character of Joan, so it’s not like she was a nobody actor waiting for her big break. In fact, her involvement in this movie clearly meant that the producers/director decided on “Hey, let’s get a Christina Hendricks in this, people recognize her!” to draw in audiences by putting her name on the cast list.
Frankly, Blanche could have been played by any woman in Hollywood. They could have grabbed a nobody off the street and the character would have been exactly the same. They could have taken away her two lines of dialog and nothing would have changed. Her inclusion was absolutely pointless.
So now Driver was alone, the last survivor of a three-man setup, and was out for revenge because Standard died, which meant that now Benicio didn’t have a father. It’s not clear why he was so upset about that, as he clearly enjoyed the pseudo-father-figure role he filled before Standard came home from prison.
And then it got incredibly graphically violent.
Blanche’s head exploded from a shotgun blast. Driver stomped a guy’s head into mush as if it were a watermelon. A dude got a fork through the eye and then his throat stabbed. Shannon got his arm slit open and left to bleed out.
Because the entire second half of this movie was violence, it didn’t qualify as dog-shit cookies. However, there wasn’t a reason for the violence. The movie didn’t start out as a murder-y action flick like the “John Wick” movies do, which meant that the tone shift from ‘puppy-love Gosling’ to ‘murderous Gosling’ stemmed entirely from a director who didn’t know how to actually tell the story he wanted, and instead just crammed two separate ideas together while the sycophants around him didn’t bother say it was a bad idea. It’s not that I’m against gore - “Shoot Em Up” (2007) was gory like this was, but at least it was consistent and thematically relevant.
This movie earned it’s R rating, even though it didn’t need to. The violence could easily have been relegated to Marvel-type wounds, where even though it was clear someone was dying or being killed, all you saw was a little blood and a lifeless body.
And there was a scene in a strip club, because of course there was. It was in a changing room full of topless strippers, including one unnecessarily extended scene that just focused on one woman’s bust.
Why? Why did that need to be there? There was nothing relevant about the strip club, other than that’s where one of the criminals happened to be, exactly when Driver needed to hunt him down. He could have been at a bodega getting food, or a pawn shop, or harassing someone in an alley.
The movie already had the R rating from the over-the-top violence, so why not throw in some naked women with zero contextual value!
Eventually Driver was down to his last two marks, Nino (Ron Pearlman) and Bernie (Albert Rose). When he went to go kill Nino, he wore a silicon head - the kind used by movie prop departments to make a stunt double look mildly like the actual actor from a distance - and stood outside Nino’s restaurant like a creep who wanted to wear Nino’s skin as pajamas. But then he waited until Nino was driving home, crashed him off a cliff, climbed down with impossible speed, and drowned him in the Pacific Ocean, all under the darkness of night, which made the facemask entirely unnecessary.
I have to assume there was a cut version of that scene where Driver’s identity being hidden was actually useful.
To wrap up this stupid, stupid waste of time, Driver called Irene and gave her some insipid monologue about how much he loved her and wanted to be with her and Benicio, but couldn’t, for her protection or something. It was the same idiotic ‘reasoning’ used at the end of “Darkman” (1990), and it wasn’t any better here.
Then he stabbed Bernie, Bernie stabbed him, and Driver left the duffle-bag full of cash next to Bernie’s dead body and drove away into the sunset.
Why?
Because this movie hated everything about logical storytelling and character motivations.
As for the crimes: it turned out all of the crime in L.A. was conveniently wrapped up in a nice little bow. Standard’s old crew, Shannon’s boss’s boss, Driver’s revenge targets. All of it. All of them knew each other and somehow worked together, like the criminal version of “Valentine’s Day” (2010). It worked out conveniently for the plot, because then it meant that there were actually only a few bad guys and they all got what they deserved and there were no loose ends.
Convenient for the plot; implausible coincidence that it would actually roll out like that.
The special effects were… violent. It was all blood. The car chase was barely more than highway driving, so I don’t know if the production crew even paid for a real stunt driver.
The music was sorta good. The movie poster and opening credit fonts had an Outrun vibe: “Outrun” is a genre/theme type the internet created as a facsimile of 1980’s action movies, colorschemes, and synth music. The band FM-87 has a great example of that right here.
The movie started with Outrun for the coloring and music, then promptly dropped it around the halfway point when it was clear that the theme no longer supported the story, which further solidified my theory that the director just mashed two separate ideas together.
The music played in the second half was memorable only for how bad it was.
I would like to point out that not giving your main character a name isn’t creative. It worked in “Fight Club” (1999) because ‘Jack’s Voice’ was the guy going crazy and had a split personality with an anarchist. In “Baby Driver” (2017), the character’s nickname was “Baby” (for some reason) and he was the getaway driver, so that made sense.
For Gosling’s character to be named ‘Driver’ in the credits, because at no point did anyone bother to actually reference him by name, was simply lazy writing. It’s the kind of thing where someone came up with the idea to leave him nameless, thinking they were some kind of special for coming up with such a ‘mysterious’ idea, and instead of anyone around that writer saying “No dude, that’s stupid,” everyone else jumped on that band wagon and here we are.
And a few other things:
Mattresses do not stop bullets. Hiding behind one while someone shoots at you will not keep you safe.
Driver’s personal car - some kind of late-model muscle car - had no seatbelts. Irene was unreasonably okay with letting Benicio sit in the car, both in the back seat and on her lap, including a scene where Driver rocketed down the L.A. spillways for fun. How did he get down there? He wasn’t the kind of person who should have access.
Irene was ready to go to start having an emotional (if not physical) affair with Driver. She never stated any fears of Standard, and when he returned, she didn’t act unhappy around him. In fact, she seemed pretty thrilled that he was home until she remembered that Driver existed, then she got sad.
Standard told the story of how he met Irene, and apparently impregnated her when she was 17. He was weirdly cool about admitting statutory rape to Driver.
And, if Irene was 17 when she had Benicio - who was 5-7 in the movie - that meant she was 22-24. As I don’t believe Driver was in his 20s, that made his attraction to her less comfortable too.While executing his series of revenge murders, Driver wandered through a movie set in a blood-stained jacket. On a movie set, I realize that probably wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows, but he kept wearing that jacket once he left the set too - that should have raised some serious red flags to random passers-by.
So to wrap this up: I give this movie a 1-Claw.
If you want to watch cool stunt driving, watch “Baby Driver.”
If you want to watch creative murders, watch “John Wick.”
If you want to watch graphic murders, watch “Shoot Em Up”
If you want to watch all three, but done really really badly, watch this.
I’m so glad I didn’t waste money to see it in theaters, but I’m still upset that I lost 100 minutes watching it from my couch.
