The Nut Behind the Wheel

"Drive" (2011) is a film I wanted to like a lot more than I did.  It has a cool neo-noir style and and impressive cast; Ryan Gosling, Ron Perlman, Oscar Issac and Bryan Cranston (from the TV series "Breaking Bad").  Sadly, the movie had a contrived/convoluted storyline, as well as some glaring continuity errors.  I also feel like the protagonist (referred to simply as "Driver" in both the original novel and motion picture adaptation) needed a bit more to him.  Maybe he would be a more interesting character if he was a crooked cop, or a person who landed somewhere on the autistic spectrum.  Armchair script doctoring aside, what does "Drive" have to do with video games?  Well...not a lot, but more than you might think.

Looking at the official soundtrack cover it's easy to draw a parallel to the GTA series (particularly Vice City).  However, there's actually an older series that got started on the PSX, a game called Driver: You Are the Wheelman.  The title is pretty self-explanatory and it plays a lot like the start of the film "Drive".  The player accepts missions via messages left on his answering machine.  Sometimes the player has a mutually-exclusive choice between two (or three) jobs and sometimes they get to listen to rather hilarious requests made by people who obviously had the wrong phone number.  The missions themselves follow a similar theme of traveling to series of locations, tailing another car, ditching the cops or running someone off the road in one of four major cities: Miami, San Francisco, New York and Los Angles.  That last location is the place in which  "Drive" takes place.  It's also set in around the same basic time period (1980s) and features a number of classic muscle cars.  As far as I can remember, Driver was a very difficult game, with a mandatory tutorial at the beginning that was not easy to complete.  The sequel allowed the player exit the vehicle and enter another, making it a kind of proto-GTA.  Unsurprising, I suppose, when one considers that Driver: You Are the Wheelman and Driver 2 slightly pre-date all but the two-dimensional top-down GTA games.

Interestingly enough, The Driver series was heavily inspired by the old Steve McQueen film "Bullitt" in addition to other car chase films from that era of cinema.  So, what we have here is a case of "Drive" being a film adapted from a novel, based on a video game, which in turn was a tribute to another movie.  I'm almost tempted to say it should have been a game, but I think in order for a crime-themed driving game to work in this day-and-age the gameplay needs to have a certain Je ne sais quoi in order to work.  Otherwise it's just a GTA clone, but with a more limited feature set.