"I used to produce movies, in the 80s. Kind of like action films. Sexy stuff. One critic called them European. I thought they were shit."
Nicolas Winding Refn doesn't make any illusions about his being a specific taste, and the negative reactions to his films only reinforce that resolve he's created. To that note, "Drive" works so exceptionally as a title to his latest film, which sees him crafting his festishizations to peak effect. Some could, and many probably are, talking about how this is a film about what people live for and what spurs them on, or to be a bit more direct, what drives them. In more than a few ways, it absolutely is. You don't have to be an esteemed critic to figure that out. However, Refn hasn't ever really been about philosophical exercises on the purpose of humanity, and he doesn't pretend to this time either.
"Drive" is a full-blooded narrative film, from that gut-in-throat opening scene on. That opening sets the stage in a way that almost counter-productively puts the audiences expecting an action film with the wrong impression. Then they're stuck with another 90 minutes they'll slap with the label of "boring", completely ignoring the craft at work. There isn't anything that's drastically original here. Ryan Gosling plays a movie stuntman who works as a getaway driver for the criminal underworld. He gets involved in a job that goes wrong, and it endangers the recently found love of his life. It's a general genre exercise, to put it in blunt and diminishing terms.
