Drive is now streaming on Netflix
It wanted to be The Italian Job. It wanted to be something along the lines of the original Fast and Furious trilogy as well as something along the lines of the race heist stuff we have seen off late in this series. But what it is an absolute embarrassment that is painful to watch. What we get is something that seems just patched together like a collage made by a primary school kid using marble paper torn into pieces.
Directed by Tarun Mansukhani, this film focuses on a group of street racing thieves whose aim is to break into the Rashtrapati Bhavan and loot money from a corrupt official. They make robbing this high-security location seem difficult with all the plans and stuff. However, the convenience with which everything happens made me think that they are planning to rob the local grocery store.
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They tried to ape Tokyo Drift here in Delhi. The opening credits conclude with the film’s title constructed with the use of a national monument acting as the ‘I’ in ‘Drive.’ This was the first thing that puts me off. The establishing shot of the film’s lead actress has her in heels after she gets out of a car. Are we expected to believe that a person wearing heels managed to win a street drag race?
Following this, things in the script just seem to fall in place conveniently. The lack of build is appalling and one can just sense what will happen in the next scene. Codes tracking… next scene it is. Need an inside guy…. next scene it is. She won’t trust anyone else…. well let’s ensure she trusts him. When?… Ummm… next scene it is. Anyone familiar with that story of the Baudelaires called ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events?’ That one had a theme song called” Look Away”. The same song would be an apt title for this piece of a series of grey cells destroying a series of fortunate events.
There was a scene in this film that made me appreciate the animals in the live-action Lion King. The gag was along the lines of something seen in Tom and Jerry and is a gross misrepresentation of matters such as security. It’s something that did manage to catch the authorities by surprise. I was surprised at this being able to make to the final script of a film. But in a film where the writer seems to think that the security of important buildings in the country will be less due to things such as a lunch break? Are you kidding me? Even 10-year-olds aren’t going to fall for such nonsense.
The acting too isn’t something that can be remembered. When asked about the cast of this film all I remember is an extremely smug-looking MS Dhoni (Sushant Singh Rajput) and Jacqueline Fernandez who seems as though she is trying to give us a look as though she has done something smart. Agreeing to be part of this puerile film contradicts that. Drive is a hotchpotch and incoherent mess. Here anything is possible and we need to be ready to expect the unexpected.
Speaking of expecting the unexpected this film manages to have CGI take away the thrills that race junkies will seek from a film of this title. Every single high-speed chase has been created with CGI cars on CGI roads, with video game-like CGI trees on the side. Fashion designers will be mind-boggled by the perplexing costume switch. The songs are just shoehorned into the film for the sake of it and do nothing but extend it’s run time. You don’t even buy into the film’s final showdown as you wonder why thieves had not made a quick getaway.
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The film does use good focus techniques. But after watching such a childish script unfold, it may be possible to attribute anything that has the remotest possibility of being good as something unappreciated by an annoyed and tired mind. Emphasis on the words ‘remotest possibility here.’
Fatigue aside as well the twists are absurd. Who is trying to trick whom? All of us who watched it have certainly been tricked into giving up 2 hours watching this mediocrity.
You COULD appreciate this if you haven’t seen films of this genre before. It MAY WORK if you watch it for the sole purpose of being entertained for a couple of hours. But such a film in this period will draw audiences to interpret each twist. They want entertainment to be something that can be believed. Hence this film fails.
Painful to watch and painful to digest the film’s only good part is that it went direct to video. It is disappointing to see that Netflix picked up Drive – an incoherent mess to stream worldwide.
★
Watch Drive Netflix Trailer
Drive Netflix Links – IMDb
