Hungkat’s review published on Letterboxd:
I give you five minutes when we get there. Anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours. No matter what. Anything a minute on either side of that and you're on your own.
The night is vibrant with city lights and discotheque music pumping loud and proud. A driver who is icily stolid, wearing gloves, hands on steering wheel with a toothpick stuck between lips. The sensational intensity for a getaway drive fills up the gas tank but the serene look on his face somehow tells otherwise. Vroom Vroom Vroom !!! In a wink of an eye, the car swooshes across L.A’s exotic madscape - You blink, and he is gone in just a finger-snap, vanished in thin air. Heroism is trapped inside the flesh of villainy. The road becomes unexpectedly diverged, accompanied by a thin light-beam striking through the narrow slit of darkness. Kavinsky ft Lovefoxxx’s Nightcall blares up from an old-fashioned jukebox, supposedly from a "nearby bar", violently cudgeling multiple eardrums in absolute ecstatic sublimity.
"The Scorpion and The Frog" tale stings hard, being a hero is never easy. It is in the fate of our own quiet protagonist as he battles against his true nature to do right and protect the ones he loves the most. Glossy in pink, vivid colors of daylight & night, and Nicholas Winding Refn’s neo-noir drenched palette marvelously swoops straight through optic nerves, leaving us ravish in pleasures. Vicious acts hit the screen along with blood spurts in slow motion; the hammer slams and cracks, followed by a cranium getting inhumanely crushed. A narrative that’s quite simple but atmospherically dreamy, fiendishly hitting every right note to be so emotionally impactful. Cliff Martinez’s Tick of The Clock repeatedly bouncing up and down our subconscious, letting us know things are all going down soon, one by one, calmly but surely. The cast excels while the movie wondrously submerges in its vibing retro style, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…then it patiently waits to bludgeon our senses with a strange feel of romantic brutalism that is even harder to resist. The road is simply there waiting for The Driver to take his first step towards brighter days and A Real Hero is miraculously formed in the process.
Anything else for me to say ?
...
So
*Vroom*
I Drive.