★★
A notorious thief allies with a street racer for a grand heist involving an elaborate game of deceit with authorities, who have their own dirty secrets.
Classification: 15
Hilariously bad. No, really there are parts to Drive that will have your jaw drop from the sheer stupidity of the film's logic and execution of action and drama in this Bollywood Fast & Furious rip off. Almost worth watching for horrendous CGI car chases and unrelenting plot-twisting narrative alone, the glory to Tarun Mansukhani's film is that it may be the first terrible Netflix film worth a damn. Never tedious, although it can get rough at times the ridiculous plot and execution of its gold ingot robbery is kept fresh with musical numbers, terrible acting, and horrendous action. Drive may be ripping off of Hollywood to make this the best action film it could be in the eyes of the filmmakers, but it may just be the finest parody to modern blockbusters that will have an audience howl with laughter.
There's a portion of the film where the story just stops and turns into a holiday vlog with the main cast partying in Isreal for a good five-minute montage. No real bearing to the plot, just literally the cast having fun at the production's expense which captures the essence of Drive perfectly. No one is taking any seriously, the plot is ludicrous and the way Mansukhani builds his world and characters stems from the most predictable of stereotypes and clichés. It's part of what makes Drive enjoyable, the sheer impossibility to view it as anything else besides a joke, making the more bizarre filmmaking choices easier to digest. Riddled with the cheapest CGI consisting of horribly rendered backgrounds and car chases, the action elements to the film are the weakest but astounding in how terrible the final result is.
The main plot is a twisting narrative revolving around a criminal mastermind, corruption, street racing and a very large amount of money and gold. Basically trying to capture the tone and feel of a sophisticated action crime thriller but just fails at every turn, from the bumbling nature of the villains to the outrageous expressions of the actors during flashbacks that reveal the countless betrayals. Drive can't stop itself in how terrible it is but it when the audience begins to lose interest, the film will pull out another stupid twist that has you chuckling at the atrocious endearing nature of it all. Surprisingly the heist scenes are enjoyable because this is where the overlapping madness of the film pays off in the dumbest of ways.
Drive is desperately trying to be a proper Hollywood movie but it's so much better when it throws all pretence away and goes full-blown schlock. It's not one of those films that are so bad it's good, it's still a piece of garbage that has this awful fake aesthetic to the whole thing. Glamourising the worst qualities in people and storytelling however with no grounding in reality, it just feels like a child's interpretation of cops and robbers. It's a strange mix battle of Bollywood and Hollywood and the final product will just be another forgettable icon lost in the Netflix algorithm but there's another bad filmmaking to make it worth the comical ride.
Director: #TarunMansukhani
Release Date: November 1st 2019
Available exclusively on Netflix
Trailer:
Written review copyright ©CoreyBullochReviews
Images from the Internet Movie Database, Synopsis from Netflix
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