Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		5.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		4.0

Drive Hard Blu-ray Movie Review

Don't Say Anything

Reviewed by Michael Reuben November 14, 2014

John Cusack has routinely played outsiders, going back to his early defining roles in Better Off Dead and Say Anything. But ever since playing neurotic hitman Martin Blank in the cult classic Grosse Point Blank, Cusack seems to be drawn to characters who are definitively antisocial: contract killers, cold-blooded criminals, even borderline psychopaths. It's almost as if he'd found a specialty, and it can't just be typecasting, since Cusack often develops his own material. Unfortunately for the audience, too many of these characters have lacked the signature quality that made Martin Blank so memorable and entertaining, which was his darkly humorous edge. From the troubled hitman in War, Inc. to the conflicted government agent in The Numbers Station to the terrifying "Clem" in Grand Piano to the suspicious lackey in The Bag Man, Cusack's bad guys have ceased to be fun.

Apparently, what Cusack needed was a trip to Australia. In the quicky Oz production Drive Hard, Cusack plays a skilled American thief who has a score to settle with a crime syndicate headquartered in the Gold Coast of Queensland. His character claims he's never killed anyone, but that sounds like a technical evasion, given the behavior he demonstrates throughout the film. (As Tom Cruise says in Collateral: "I shot him. The bullet and the fall killed him.") The role was originally intended for Jean-Claude Van Damme, but when the Muscles from Brussels dropped out and Cusack suddenly became available, writer/director Brian Trenchard-Smith, a famed veteran of Ozsploitation, hurriedly rewrote the script and let Cusack and co-star Thomas Jane (The Punisher) develop the film's central relationship during a fast-paced eighteen-day shoot.

Trenchard-Smith's specialty is creating the illusion of a much bigger budget than he actually has. The title of the film may be Drive Hard and Jane's character may be a former race car driver, but the demolition derby sequences are relatively limited. Trenchard-Smith knows he can't compete with a Hollywood franchise like the Fast and Furious series, and he doesn't try. Far more interesting than the car chases is the interplay between Cusack and Jane, which Trenchard-Smith has likened to that of Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin in Midnight Run. That may be setting the bar too high, but the comparison gives an apt sense of what Drive Hard does best.

Jane plays Peter Roberts, a former race car driver who retired from the sport for family life with a daughter, Becca (an uncredited child actress), and an attorney wife, Tessa (Yesse Spence), who wanted him not to take any more risks. Now Roberts is a driving instructor, whose car, with its driving school signage, embarrasses Becca when he drives her to school. He's trying to gather the funds to invest in a training school for race car drivers in the hope of getting back in touch with his former self, but Mrs. Roberts doesn't approve.

Roberts' wake-up call arrives in the person of a new pupil named Simon Keller (Cusack), a fellow American who says he needs lessons on how to drive on the left side of the rode, in the style of England and her former colonies. What Keller really wants is a "wheel man" with Roberts' skills to help him get away when he makes a quick stop at the International Bank & Trust and steals $9 million in bearer bonds, payment owed for a job Keller did five years ago at the behest of a rising syndicate star, Rossi (Christopher Morris). There are elements of Point Blank and Payback in the backstory, especially as Rossi desperately tries to reassure his superiors at the Bank, a syndicate front, that he can deal with Keller and recover the stolen bonds.

Forced into a high-speed chase—first by Keller and then by the police, who assume that Roberts, too, is a bank robber—the former racer is terrified and outraged, and Keller has to use every means of psychological manipulation at his command to persuade the reluctant family man to continue along the path that Keller has mapped out for their escape. With the practiced eye of an outsider, Keller pierces through Roberts' surface of normalcy and diagnoses all of his personal and marital problems as a function of having given up the sporting life he loved. Meanwhile, Roberts tells Keller what a loser he is for being a criminal, and while Keller doesn't exactly disagree, it's clear that he's winning the argument, because at least he knows who he is. The byplay between the law-abiding hypocrite and the amoral crook who may lie to others but doesn't lie to himself makes for the film's best moments.

Since Drive Hard is a road movie more than a chase film, the mismatched pair also encounter a few interesting characters along their route. With their pictures plastered all over the media, they are routinely recognized, which makes the encounters unpredictable. The operator of a gas station and convenience store (Christopher Sommers) turns vigilante (with a twist) and, in the process, demonstrates why it takes more than a shotgun to enforce the law. An elderly granny (Carol Burns) who runs a winery and resort with her husband (Robert Newman) welcomes them to a wine tasting event, and Roberts thinks she's a sweet old lady. Keller looks into her eyes and sees trouble, and of course he turns out to be right. (It takes one to know one.) There's also a hardcore motorcycle gang that looks like they rode into the film straight out of a classic Seventies Ozsploitation flick (and pretty much behaves that way too).

Back at the Roberts home, Tessa and Becca are besieged by reporters, and Becca is suddenly the coolest girl in school, because her dad is on TV! Tessa doesn't know what to believe, but she's less upset about the reports that her husband robbed a bank than when the pretty young receptionist at the driving school (Francesca Bianchi) gets in front of the cameras and claims (falsely) that she and Roberts were having an affair. Only one person seems to be worrying about Roberts' future in all of this, and that's Keller. He actually does have a plan to return the driver to his regular life free of any criminal charges—assuming they both survive.

Law enforcement has its own subplot in this story. The local police are thoroughly corrupt, owned by the syndicate that is hunting Keller. As soon as they learn of the bank robbery, Det. Chief Inspector Smith (Damien Garvey) and Det. Blanchard (Andrew Buchanan) agree that they have to be the ones to capture Keller and "recover" the bonds. But they are immediately pushed aside by Federal Agents Walker and Brown (Zoe Ventoura and Jason Wilder), who know that the station is rotten and have been investigating the syndicate for months. As both the cops and the agents follow the trail of Keller and Roberts across Queensland, they almost seem to lose interest in the case, as they become preoccupied with outsmarting each other.

Drive Hard Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Drive Hard was shot on Red by Tony O'Loughlan, making his first feature film as cinematographer after a career as a camera operator and in visual effects. With post-production completed on a digital intermediate, Image Entertainment/RLJ's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was presumably sourced directly from digital files, and the result should certainly satisfy enthusiasts looking for the pristine, sharply defined appearance typical of contemporary HD video productions. Edges are crisp and well-defined, detail is plentiful and colors are vibrant throughout. There are scenes in Drive Hard that would fit neatly into a promotional video for travel to the Gold Coast, because they make it look so inviting. Coupled with the complete absence of noise or other artifacts, the clarity of the Blu-ray's image makes this production a pleasure to watch.

Image has sometimes been known to starve their Blu-ray presentations for bandwidth, but this 96-minute film has no extras and therefore achieves an average bitrate of 26.20 Mbps, which is very good for Red-originated footage and no doubt contributes in some measure to the superior quality of the final product.

Drive Hard Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's 5.1 soundtrack, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, packs the requisite punch for gunfire and the impact of vehicles against each other and a variety of obstacles blocking their path. The bass extension provides an appropriate rumble for the vehicles of the motorcycle gang that catches up with Roberts and Keller on the open highway. The shootout that occurs shortly afterward is particularly impressive.

Subtlety is not something to expect from a Trenchard-Smith production. When Roberts takes the wheel and evades, first, the police, and then the syndicate, there's a lot of whizzing and squealing, but don't look for any of the precise sense of placement or directionality that one might find in a big-budget studio film. They don't call Trenchard-Smith "the Australian Roger Corman" for nothing.

Drive Hard Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The disc has no extras, but at startup it plays trailers for The Numbers Station, Rage , Odd Thomas and Tomorrow You're Gone. These can be skipped with the chapter forward button and are otherwise unavailable once the disc loads.

Drive Hard Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Drive Hard is not a polished production. Trenchard-Smith's work rarely is. But there's a distinctive quality about it, or he wouldn't be one of Quentin Tarantino's favorite filmmakers. I suspect it's the older director's knack for giving an unexpected spin to what, in other hands, might be merely formulaic junk. In this case, that means pairing Cusack and Jane in an absurd situation within the framework of a routine crime film. It's the details that make it worthwhile, like Cusack's omnipresent e-cigarette or the throwaway exchanges between the elderly granny and her long-suffering husband or Jane's stammering inability to explain to his wife how he got strong-armed into driving a getaway car. If you can enjoy this kind of embroidery, Drive Hard is for you. The Blu-ray presentation certainly can't be faulted.