I remember hearing rave reviews when “Drive” first came out. People were referring to it as one of the best films of 2011 and one of the best car chase films of the millennium. I expected something exciting but what I got was an artsy crime drama that made me want to yawn more than anything else. It’s not awful but it’s just unnecessarily violent and anti-climactic.

An unnamed mechanic (Ryan Gosling “The Nice Guys”, “Only God Forgives”) makes extra money by doing stunts for the movies and working as a getaway driver for armed robbers. When he tries to help out his neighbour (Carey Mulligan “Suffragette”, “Shame”) and her family, he ends up in the sights of local mobsters.

Ryan Gosling is very disappointing in this movie but then again, he does get all that much to do. He usually just stands around staring into space. The poor guy only gets to speak about as much as Dolph Lundgren did in “Rocky IV”. Carey Mulligan also has to spend a lot of time just staring into space. There’s absolutely zero chemistry between them. Bryan Cranston (“Argo”, “Trumbo”), Albert Brooks (“Broadcast News”) and Ron Perlman (“Hellboy”) are all in here but none of them get to do anything very interesting.

The violence in the movie is appalling as one scene has Gosling’s character stamp on a man’s face until there is no face left to stamp on. The driving scenes are way too short and none of them are entertaining. I think we only get to see two getaway drives in the whole movie. Seriously, how lame is that? I do not mind that this movie is trying to be slow and more of an arthouse type of thing but it’s not done very well. There are a few parts of it that seem promising but when you get to the end, you realise that it wasn’t building to all that much.