'Drive' Review

At their heart, all action movies are pretty much the same, at least when it comes to plot. That can be said of any genre, but with action it is a bit more obvious - especially with the amount of explosions, CGI effects and hyper-kinetic editing often used to cover it up. Yet not every thriller needs the Michael Bay treatment, although it sometimes seems like it these days - which leaves Danish director Nichols Winding Refn to "Drive" the genre into a more surreal setting.

By day, a young man with no given name works as a Hollywood stunt driver and mechanic, and by night he moonlights as a getaway driver for criminals. His mentor Shannon even has to turn to a former movie producer with mob ties to bankroll his efforts to get into stock car racing. But a ray of light seeps through for the Driver once he starts spending time with his female neighbor Irene and her little boy. However, her husband Standard is just about to get out of jail, and is still in debt to some very dangerous people. To ensure that they don't come after Irene, the Driver helps Standard pull off a job to settle his debt - only to get caught in the middle when it all goes sideways.

"Drive" marks the mainstream debut of cult indie director Refn - and by describing the plot, it sounds as mainstream as possible. From just hearing about it, it sounds like the same action plot that can be seen in any big studio thriller. Many directors would just work with that and call it a day, yet Refn proves to have a lot more up his sleeve. In fact, he filters this standard plot and setup into the kind of movie that David Lynch or David Cronenberg would dream up.

Even that is misleading, since "Drive" doesn't have the kind of outrageous twists and bizarre, mind-bending situations that Lynch and Cronenberg traffic in. Yet while Refn doesn't borrow from their weirder elements, he matches them with his stylistic filmmaking, dream-like setting, haunting soundtrack - with help from Cliff Martinez and frequent Lynch composer Angelo Badalamenti - and sudden acts of brutality.

In fact, once most of the brutal violence revs up in the second half, "Drive" takes on more of a Martin Scorsese feel to round it out, or even Cronenberg's recent "mainstream" thrillers like "A History of Violence" and "Eastern Promises." Trying to subvert a genre while paying homage to it is a tricky business, since action and the art house don't usually mix. But while this can make "Drive" feel more like an experiment than an actual movie, perhaps it only feels that way in this age of action films.

Refn harkens back to a period where action movies could afford to slow down and not pump special effects and explosions in every five minutes. For that matter, "Drive" doesn't even have a single explosion at all, and only has three major sequences on the road in spite of its title. But in those set pieces, Refn actually let the viewer get thrilled without shaking the camera around or injecting ear-splitting music and explosions, which is becoming a lost art.

In bringing the action genre back to the old school with a bit of Lynch and Cronenberg mixed in, Refn has made a hybrid that is not an easy sell. Perhaps that's why it fell quickly from the box office charts once audiences saw that it was more experimental and offbeat than the trailers indicated. Yet when "Drive" hits its marks, it hits harder and more hauntingly than most action blockbusters of the last several years.

Refn even borrows from Clint Eastwood Westerns in making Ryan Gosling into a virtually silent Man with No Name. Even if the style, directorial tricks and slow pace may turn viewers off, the movie has Gosling to anchor it through every shift and turn. Despite having a limited vocabulary, Gosling's face reveals and says more than 10 times more dialogue would have. And with Refn to fill in the rest, he and Gosling combine to make the Driver an action icon in his own right - or at least he would be if more people saw him.

Gosling says more with less than almost anyone in recent memory, although Carey Mulligan has become an expert at that as well in films like "An Education" and "Never Let Me Go." Since there's even less to go on with Mulligan's character than Gosling's, she has to work even harder to fill in the gaps, yet she does so without having to say much out loud as well.

Most of the talking is left to Albert Brooks in his already iconic turn to evil, but both he and the violence are really kept in check until the second half. However, like "Drive" itself does with the action genre, Brooks takes his typical routine and turns it into something new, twisted and hard to forget. For all of the astonishment at seeing Brooks in this kind of movie and role, there isn't a second where he's out of place at all - which not every seemingly typecast actor can pull off.

If Brooks, Gosling and Mulligan didn't provide enough of an embarrassment of riches, Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman and Oscar Issac add a few of their own as well. Yet one of Refn's biggest sins is leaving "Mad Men" bombshell Christina Hendricks as the only wasted star in the bunch.

"Drive" is not for those who have been weaned on Bay films, "Fast and Furious" sequels or other bombastic action spectacles. It might not even be for those who like more offbeat fare, if they find this more of a collection of homages than a complete film.

But just as the Lynch's, Scorsese's and Cronenberg's of the past borrowed from genre clichés and different genres entirely to make their mark, Refn does the same to "Drive" a breath of fresh air into the formula. And perhaps if he keeps doing so in the years ahead and gets wider recognition for it, directors of the future will try to copy and borrow from Refn's imitations as well.