Drive Review

Refn strips a pulp premise down to mood and then holds every shot two beats longer than comfort allows. Newton Thomas Sigel photographs Los Angeles as a city of overhead sodium light and empty overpasses, and the elevator sequence, warm light rising into a kiss and then a head stamped flat, compresses the whole film into ninety seconds. Cliff Martinez's score and the Kavinsky and College tracks do work the script refuses to do, which is the trade at the center of the picture: the driver speaks maybe two hundred words, so Gosling has to act with a toothpick and a scorpion jacket, and mostly he manages it.

Albert Brooks, cast against every instinct, is the real find, a producer of straight-to-video schlock who opens men's arms with a paring knife. The plot is thin by choice, a pawn-shop job and a bag of money, and the dialogue is thinner still, closer to gesture than to writing. Graded as a screenplay it is slight. Graded as a surface it is close to perfect.