The Driver Review

One of those movies so downbeat that it’s virtually flat-lining, Driver features a mean streets battle of wits between the eponymous getaway man (Ryan O’Neal) and the detective (Bruce Dern) determined to be the first man to arrest him. In theory, the plot concerns Dern’s increasingly psychotic attempt to set up his prey with a bogus bank job, but really this is a movie more concerned with machines than machinations as director Walter Hill drags in half of North America’s stuntmen to demolish more cars than a week-long demolition derby. Sadly, while the automobile action is as good as it gets O’Neal appears to have mistaken silence and sunglasses for characterisation. The result is a fair-to-middling auto-noir(two ital) with a hole in the middle roughly the size of its leading man’s head.