Drive begins like a wannabe Dhoom (2004) and ends like a dumber version of Dhoom 3 (2013). But without the imaginative prowess that these more popular Bollywood heist films at least had as director Tarun Mansukhani comes out of his cave after ten years to create a slipshod action drama based on street racing and gold heists with cardboard characters. For a Netflix production, it has a nauseating setup, terrible CGI, and most importantly, substandard cars - all of which take the fun out of watching the movie in just the first ten minutes. I mean it's grotesque to see all the usual tropes in the first few minutes of a film which is aggravated by poor performance by its cast; it almost feels like a poorly directed telefilm of the early 2000s. For a film whose x-factor is cars Drive has stupid-looking versions of Maruti Swift, Hyundai Verna, and Tata Nano in the spotlight. Well, I can hand it to the makers for not internationalizing it (till the first half) but I would expect at least some help from Dilip Chhabria. Even the gold bars - which are the central plot element that the characters are vying for here - look like cardboard versions that schoolkids make for annual project competition. There's a lot of thing wrong with Drive and they are all so awfully unaesthetic and out-of-place watching it becomes a form of self-hurting. I do not recommend it at all even if you are a fan of the lead actors who do nothing but disappoint with their unpolished dialogue delivery. It almost felt like I was watching Sushant Singh Rajput and Jacqueline Fernandez read out their lines with zero rehearsal or direction from Mansukhani. Easily the most ambitious failure of 2019. TN.
