DVD review: Drive (18), 96 minutes, Icon Home Entertainment, action/thriller/ romance **** (From York Press)

DVD review: Drive (18), 96 minutes, Icon Home Entertainment, action/thriller/ romance ****

10:24am Friday 3rd February 2012 in Film reviews By Charles Hutchinson

NOT since Saving Private Ryan has a long, silent opening to a film said so much to set the atmosphere.

Very different films, of course, and no further comparison is needed, but what that ten-minute silence does in Drive is establish the lead character’s loner status – enhanced by filming from inside the car – and the supreme confidence of Nicolas Winding Refn’s direction of this bravura yet stern action-thriller, adapted from the novel by James Sallis.

Surprisingly overlooked for an Oscar nomination, flavour-of-the-moment Ryan Gosling plays a flint-eyed, speed-junkie Hollywood stunt man who moonlights as a getaway driver. He is in full moonlighting mode at the start, chewing on a toothpick, eyes and ears alert to the chasing police cars and helicopter lights as he escorts two robbers through the Los Angeles streets to the safety of a crowded car park. Rapid camerawork and Cliff Martinez’s foreboding score are crucial to the slowly rising tension that never bursts.

Driver by job and just ‘Driver’ in the credits list too, he combines days on big-budget action-movie sets with down time as a mechanic for garage owner Shannon (Bryan Cranston), the link man for his nefarious nocturnal high-speed engagements for the criminal world. Little time is left for sleep, as his pallor testifies.

Yet he is drawn to bonny Irene (Carey Mulligan), the young mother in a neighbouring apartment, building a bond with her boy Benicio (Kaden Leos) while husband Standard Gabriel (Oscar Isaac) is doing time.

Standard’s release from prison is the trigger for trouble. He owes protection money and the Driver feels obliged to drive the car that will speed him from his robbery of a pawn shop, but it all goes wrong, setting the Driver on a collision course with crime hoods Bernie Rose (Albert Brooks) and Nino (Ron Perlman).

Unlike Mulligan’s Irene, it is not a pretty sight, and Refn does not hold back from the sudden bursts of pummelling violence and brutality as the Driver’s world turns ever darker, the more the conflict spirals out of control – and yet throughout the taciturn, terse outsider is as methodical and calculated and coldly daring as his driving.

Gosling and Mulligan spark up the electricity in the Driver and Irene’s ill-fated romance that was lacking in his relationship with Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine in 2010, while Brooks and Perlman’s hoodlums evoke memories of Martin Scorsese’s bunch of Goodfellas.

Director Refn, the real driver of this serious, stark thriller, steers it to the finishing line with the skill and nerve of a stuntman.