Drive, he said?: Gosling miscast as getaway driver

Drive is a throwaway, entertaining movie that's not as good as it maybe could have been but is better than many of its type, mostly because of the action-paced car chases through the streets of LA and tight script that is full of twists and surprises but doesn't go too far beyond the realm of the plausible. It has some good actors, though in my view some real casting gaffes: Ryan Gosling, good as he is on screen, is not credible as a tough guy - in this he plays a loner working as an auto mechanic and stunt drive in LAs who makes a little $ on the side as a getaway driver for hire. Obviously, he gets in way too deep when he takes on a job that puts him between conflicting mob families. Bryan Cranston is always good, and he's good here as Gosling's hapless boss and sometime career manager. Carey Mulligan is sweet and adorable and entirely miscast as wife of an ex-con thug living hand-to-mouth. In other words, the movie refuses to be as noir as it needs to be - it's like an air-brushed pulp fiction. The director - Nicholas Winding Refn (had to look it up) - is way better with the action sequences than with the romantic moments, which for some reason he stages in slo-mo or at least it felt like slo-mo, as the characters, particularly Gosling, are laconic to the point of entropy. That said, the heists and the chases are dramatic and very well paced, the mob guys seem like genuine thugs - and there's a bit of humor, too, as the gang Gosling gets tied into is a Jewish LA gang, with the biggest galoof (who runs a pizza parlor no less - why not a Kosher deli)) smarting about the anti-Semitism of the Philadelphia gangsters. Ah, Hollywood. A fun movie - but not one that sticks in the mind for very long.