This review is republished from Nick Bruno’s blog, The Rain Falls Down on Portlandtown.
Though the man has been making films for more than fifteen years now, it was in 2011 that Nicolas Winding Refn truly arrived with Drive; a cool distillation of 1980s Hollywood action and thriller tropes remixed by a cultural outsider. Many have already pointed out how Drive pulls from works associated with that decade by Michael Mann, Paul Schrader, Walter Hill and Brian De Palma and, yes, there’s absolutely something valid about that comparison. But it’s a bit of a stretch to describe the film as just an homage to films like Thief, Hardcore, The Driver and Dressed to Kill.
