DVD reviews: Drive | Rolling Thunder

By Alistair Harkness
Published on Monday 30 January 2012 00:00

Our film critic takes a look at two of this week’s new releases...

Drive

Icon, £17.99

ASIDE from Quentin Tarantino, few modern film-makers truly understand why the constituent parts of the genre films they profess to love work so well, or at least, they don’t understand them well enough to make their own modern genre classics. That’s why Drive seems like such a miraculous piece of film-making. Though it’s doubtful its Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn would ever cite Tarantino as an influence (he’s too endearingly arrogant for that), Drive certainly proves he’s his equal in terms of delivering audacious genre fare that appreciates the artistic validity of cinema’s baser elements. Refn is more of a purist than Tarantino, though, and with Drive – which revolves around Ryan Gosling’s nameless getaway driver becoming a sort of superhero protector to neighbour Carey Mulligan and her young son – he takes the tropes of already lean genre fare and fine-tunes them further, honing set-pieces into economically executed bursts of controlled fury and excising extraneous dialogue, character details and plotting to the point where all that’s left on screen is the minimum needed to effectively convey the story Refn is telling. The result is a film that celebrates the basic appeal of movies as a thing of beauty.

Rolling Thunder

StudioCanal, £12.99 (Blu-ray only)

ROLLING Thunder, on the other hand, is precisely the kind of primal movie-making that Refn and Tarantino adore (the latter even named his distribution company after it). It’s not hard to see the appeal. First released in 1977, the Paul Schrader-scripted movie was one of the first films to use returning Vietnam vets as an archetype for the damaged hero; director John Flynn’s no-nonsense approach, meanwhile, gave it the feel of a brutal and bloody update of the outlaw western. Watched today, William Devane’s lead performance – as a former prisoner-of-war whose ’Nam experiences have left him feeling disconnected from his wife, child and society at large – remains pretty feral and fearsome, especially when home invaders mangle his arm, kill his family and leave him for dead. The subsequent quest for vengeance – involving a sawn-off shotgun, a meathook and a young Tommy Lee Jones – is what great grindhouse cinema looks like in its rawest form.

• To order these DVDs, call The Scotsman on 01634 832789

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