Drive is an auteur’s action flick, a fiercely violent fairy-tale in which Ryan Gosling’s unnamed protagonist oscillates between hero and villain at breakneck speed and effortless cool. Directed by Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, renowned for his edgy and dramatically flourished biopic Bronson and layered Viking project Valhalla Rising, the film was originally earmarked as a vehicle for British B-movie behemoth Neil Marshall and Hugh Jackman, before stalling into lapsed developmental hell. Based on James Sallis’ 158-page neo-noir novella of the same name, Gosling became attached to the project in early 2010, and chose Refn to helm this LA noir, scaling back Hossein Amini’s script into a taught, brutal and stylised masterpiece.
For the most part dressed in leather driving-gloves and white satin jacket in a clear reference to Steve McQueen’s iconic role in 1971’s Le Mans, Gosling plays the driver, a Hollywood stunt-driver who moonlights as a getaway-man for the seedy criminal underbelly of contemporary Los Angeles. Offering nothing more than his superior skills in the driving seat and a five-minute window to render his services, the film opens with the driver helping two thieves evade the LAPD in a sequence that shows off not only his Stig-like expertise behind a steering wheel, but also the brilliant strategic cunning going on as he plots a route to safety in a cat and mouse game with a police helicopter.
