REVIEW: Drive (2011)

  Drive is a gritty neo-noir based on a sparse James Sallis book, which successfully harks back not only to the film noir of the 1940s, but also the existential road movies of the 1970s, such as Walter Hill’s The Driver. But does it live up to either tradition?

  Ryan Gosling plays the unnamed Driver, a movie stuntman and occasional getaway driver. He lives a lonely and uncomplicated existence, until he meets Irene (Carey Mulligan), a woman who lives down the hall. Her husband is in jail, so Driver keeps her and her young son company. A romance seems to begin until Irene’s husband (Oscar Isaac) comes home and the two men become embroiled in an increasingly murderous heist.

  Drive is a slow, somewhat meditative film with a lot of time spent lingering on Driver’s impassive face. When the car chases come, the pace speeds up, delivering some reasonably exciting action sequences. Director Nicolas Winding Refn, of Pusher and Bronson fame, has adopted the high-speed camerawork of Quentin Tarantino’s turgid Death Proof, such that the camera always keeps up with the chases. There is never a steady shot of the cars flying by – we remain with them the whole time. As a result, Drive is breezy and undemanding entertainment, but unfortunately the film has several flaws.

  Most noticeable is the painfully trite and corny romance storyline, which aims at being subtly moving, but ends up being distractingly coy. It is the film’s main weak point and it isn’t helped by Mulligan’s rather servile performance. It seems as if Refn wants to delve more into her character, to make her appear to be more than just a plot device, but has absolutely no idea how to. As a result, the film has several scenes in which Mulligan sits around or looks in a mirror as if watching her doing nothing will somehow create instant understanding and empathy in the audience. Worse, her quiet scenes in front of mirrors haunt the rest of the film’s slow paced sequences. Gosling (not much better) does the same staring-outwards-with-a-brooding-expression stuff as well, and it comes to feel like character shorthand.

  The film gets much more violent in its second half as things become more complicated. But in every bloody murder scene, Refn allows the film’s cool veneer to slip and he goes into overdrive, shooting bleeding wounds from all sorts of angles and with several close-ups. Ultimately, the film starts to feel like a cartoon. It’s not that Drive is too violent, it is just that it gets too excited by it’s own violence and loses its cool. One scene involving a fork and another involving an exploding head in slow-motion are so overdone that it looks like a bad Hostel sequel, which is absolutely not the tone that Refn aimed for in the rest of the film. Eventually, it comes to feel that Refn was only being slow paced to begin with because he wasn’t interested about the non-violent scenes.

  Drive is a moody and believable film with an almost perfect modern day pulp feel, but it lets itself down by being very lazy with the romance subplot and by being too giddy during its many murder scenes.

REVIEW: Season of the Witch (2011)

  Season of the Witch is the new film from Nicolas Cage, that oddest of actors who showed us last year that he can act with his fun performance in Kick-Ass and his fascinatingly mad turn in Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant. Here, he returns to what he has done for most of the past decade, and for which he seems to have quite a following. As in the infamous (and woeful) remake of The Wicker Man, Cage gives a comedy performance in a film, which was otherwise, perhaps, not intended for laughs.

  Season of the Witch follows Behman (Cage) and Felson (Ron Perlman) as two knights who desert the army following several bloody battles during the Crusades. Behman feels a particular dislike for the Church’s complicity in the bloodshed but it is not long before they are back in its service, assisting in the transporting of an alleged witch (Claire Foy). Their journey, with four others (including the great Stephen Graham with an odd accent), proves perilous.

  What can you make of a film as daft as Season of the Witch? It is clearly attempting to recreate the aesthetic of the classic Hammer and Corman films of the Fifties and Sixties, with a brief cameo from Christopher Lee. But while you can easily take the best of the Hammers and the Cormans at face value without a hint of irony, this film only succeeds in being comic. Either it’s the Pythonesque Crusades costumes or the rotten dialogue, which jumps back and forth between old Shakespearean dialogue and clearly modern colloquialisms; or maybe it’s Nicolas Cage himself. He seems determined to gain the kind of immortality that Ed Wood has achieved, purposefully sabotaging his own performance and, as a result, the film’s attempts at some kind of seriousness. From his rather camp stance during the revelation of a mass-death to his almost constant expression of bland confusion, he seems to be mocking the whole thing. During the funeral of a key character, he is required to speak. Cage stands stock-still and silent, apparently searching for something to say, before saying something trite and clichéd and stalking off in an apparent huff. Everyone else approaches the material with an awareness of the guff that it is and turns in good performances regardless, but Cage seems determined to show the film up.

  On the other hand, perhaps the script is at fault, including as it does an early sequence that cuts between five battles when one would have sufficed. And a scene in which Cage confronts a potential enemy with the rather welcoming, “Come off the horse” rather than the more authoritative, “Get off the horse.” Or maybe the problem is its frequent attempts to convince us that it could actually be a true story.

  Season of the Witch is a silly film and it is a rather overlong film. Despite the film’s many flaws, which stunt its ability to be either believable or involving, it manages to be reasonably entertaining. One of those films that will be remembered as a so-bad-its-good kind of film, Season of the Witch aimed to be an homage but it ends up being a spoof.