TL;DR – Today I have what might be the easiest pitch I have ever heard, its Fast and the Furious but Bollywood. Well, that is if you can get through the very uneven first hour that is and some super clunky CGI.    

Score – 3 out of 5 stars

Post-Credit Scene – There is no post-credit scene

Review –

I like me a good heist film, where you have shifting loyalties, betrayals, convoluted plans, misdirection, and of course a quick exit. So when I heard that there was a Bollywood heist film with a dash of the Fast and Furious and a sprinkle of well-choreographed dance sequences, I knew I had to give it a watch. Well, let’s dive into a world where you need to screech those tyres and aggressively change gears every half a second.

So to set the scene, the Director of Monetary Restrictions Authority Vibha Singh (Vibha Chibber) and her chief of staff Hamid (Pankaj Tripathi) are going about their days, using less than conventional technics to get businessmen to pay all their taxes when they get an urgent message from President’s office. As his aid Ifran (Boman Irani) explains there is a new thief on the scene called King because they leave a playing card with the location of their next heist at the place they have robed. Well the next place they are going to rob is right there at Rashtrapati Bhavan, India’s Presidential Palace. Their only lead is Tara (Jacqueline Fernandez) who runs an illicit courier business so they sent in a double agent Samar (Sushant Singh Rajput) to see what they can find out.

Now this is not a perfect film, by any stretch of the imagination and we will get into that in a bit. However, I found myself kind of getting sucked into this world of betrayal. To begin with the cast is all really entertaining and that nail that confident charm that you need in films like this. As well as this, I am a sucker for a good heist planning sequence and we get a couple of them throughout the film and they are edited amusing way that got a good chuckle out of me. There are some interesting dance numbers with the first song Karma being a mash between a standard Bollywood number and a 1940s swing band piece. Finally the heists themselves are as well structured as you would want with some silly moments, some will they make it moments, and of course secret reveal after another.

We’ve had the good, now it is time for the bad, and unfortunately there is quite a bit of that in this film as well. This is a film that really takes about an hour to really get going and you could have taken wrecking ball to that first hour and it still would have held up story-wise. There are a lot of things that just don’t need to be there, like multiple mistaken identities that seem to only exist for weird gotcha moments that have no impact. Then there also is this weird ad for Tel Aviv that is forced in with no context and then ends just as suddenly.

Unfortunately, with the good and the bad, it means there is also the ugly. In this case that means some simply unacceptably bad CGI cars that appear throughout the film. You first see this near the star when one character is doing a burnout around one of the leads and you go ‘okay I get why you needed to computer generate that in for safety but you could have done a better job of that.’ However, you soon come to realise that just about all the car chases (though thankfully not all of them) suffer from the same issue. I point it out because it so noticeably bad that rips you right out of the film. There was also some sound mixing issues and some moments were actors have clearly been dubbed over. Apparently the film was meant to be released last year but they pushed it back to work on it a bit more, I think they needed some more time.         

In the end, do we recommend Drive? Wellllllllll. Look I like heist films, so even with all its flaws I was enjoying its truly bonkers ending. However, you could start the film 49 minutes in and not have missed anything important and that is a barrier that I would not expect anyone to sit through. So, I think a missed opportunity.                         

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Drive
Directed by – Tarun Mansukhani
Written by – Tarun Mansukhani
Music & Lyrics by – Qaran, Tanishk Bagchi, Amartya Bobo Rahut, Javed-Mohsin, Siddhant Kaushal, Ozil Dalal, Danish Sabri  
Cinematography by – Vishal Sinha
Edited by – Tarun Mansukhani & Manas Mittal
Production/Distribution Companies – Dharma Productions, Fox STAR Studios & Netflix
Starring – Sushant Singh Rajput, Jacqueline Fernandez, Vikramjeet Virk, Sapna Pabbi, Boman Irani, Pankaj Tripathi, Vibha Chibber, Kaustubh Kumar, Paniz Rehnama, Shweta Nair, Anuj Jain, Arun Khaini, Gaurav Chaudhari,  
Rating – Around an Australia: M;