Summary
An indescribably insipid Indian heist thriller with virtually no redeeming qualities, this is genre filmmaking at its absolute worst.
Tarun Mansukhani’s Drive has nothing at all to do with the same-titled Nicholas Winding Refn masterpiece from 2011, but a comparison to even a much worse movie wouldn’t do it any favors. Released straight onto Netflix today by Dharma Productions, the first of that company’s films to ever be given such a low-key treatment, it immediately joins the list of confoundingly bad Indian originals like Brij Mohan Amar Rahe and Chopsticks. And it absolutely deserves to be ostracised with a digital-only release, because it’s appalling.
Artlessly — and often ridiculously — mashing together a handful of tropes from much better movies in the heist and street-racing genres, Drive is an embarrassingly incompetent knock-off helmed by an exhausted-looking Sushant Singh Rajput and Jacqueline Fernandez. It’s running on fumes from the word go and only gets worse from there — a car crash lasting just under two hours, every second of which would have been better spent doing literally anything else.
The particulars of the plot — it involves a major heist at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, criminal gangs, and undercover agents — are unimportant in the face of the film’s rampant stupidity. It’s a disaster without a single redeeming feature that will hopefully remain buried in Netflix’s thumbnails beneath countless films more deserving of an audience.
