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Canberra Today 25°/29° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Drive (M) ? ? ?

IN this flawed yet perversely engaging blood-and-gutser, a reticent, laconic, careful young man (Ryan Gosling) drives stunt cars for movie-makers and getaway cars for bandits.

Driving fast and surviving danger are his only interests. His partly disabled manager (Bryan Cranston) has a mobster manager (Albert Brooks) who has a money man (Ron Perlman). In the apartment along the corridor from him lives a young mother (Carey Mulligan) whose husband (Oscar Isaac) is about to get out of jail.

To this tree of criminal personalities, novelist James Sallis has grafted a plot about a heist that goes awry, a battle for the loot between the bad guys and a burgeoning relationship between the driver and the woman.

US-educated Danish director Nicholas Winding Refn and writer Hossein Amini have fashioned those elements into a crime thriller with enough excitement and tension to ameliorate its defects.

These are of minor importance and many people won’t notice them. But it does annoy me when an in-car camera films Mr Super-Cool, one hand on the 12 o’clock position and the other on his lap, guiding a souped-up Yank tank, a species never known for handling merit, through corners in a high-speed chase along urban streets without braking, changing gear or varying engine speed. Any qualified police or rally driver will understand what I’m saying.

At Greater Union, Hoyts and Limelight

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Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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