5/10
What a strange film this is, full of weird fetishism, cliches, and a vague tendency towards a deeper meaning. I couldn't say for sure if it's good or bad, but if you held a gun to my head (as people do a lot in this movie), then I'd have to say bad.
As a sign of how existential the film thinks it is, the three main characters don't have real names. There's Driver (Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock), who's been released from prison after 10 years for driving a getaway car from a robbery. He's out for revenge, big time. Then there's Cop (Billy Bob Thornton), who is a policeman, but also a junkie with an estranged wife and a fat kid. And finally, there's Killer (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), an English assassin who's been hired to kill Driver by some unknown guy. Killer lives with his beautiful girlfriend/wife, does yoga and has issues.
The main thrust of the film is Driver getting revenge for what happened to his brother, which in practice means hunting men down and killing them one by one, while he himself is hunted. Though hunted is a slight overstatement, since he seems to roam around the countryside in an unmistakeable car, without anyone bothering him. He's like a cross between Schwarzenegger in Terminator and Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men, a kind of killing machine who has an archetypally unstoppable quality. Since Johnson is something less than an actor, he does as little talking as possible, but looks troubled and sweaty when the camera is stuck in his face. The other two characters help pass the time with their own domestic crises which are frankly not very interesting, and the final revelation of who is the man behind the plan is so bleeding obvious that I don't know why they bothered with it.
Like I say, it's not unredeemably bad, partly because of these curious qualities it has. The fetishism of the human body, cars and weapons persists throughout, and the script seems to aspire to something more than simply being a car chase movie with guns. I don't think it succeeds, but I guess I have to give it credit for trying to do something a little different with the genre.
