Eight years after the intriguing failure of Fear X, Nicolas Winding Refn is back in Hollywood with Drive. The plot is forgettable—a fairly routine noir-inflected crime film plot embroidered with grandiosely brooding Melvillian (Le Samurai is an acknowledged influence on the film) cultivated peculiarity—embodied here in the films fetish objects, a unique jacket with a scorpion on the back, driving gloves, a toothpick, and rabbit’s foot keychain—and brooding sub-Michael Mann L.A. cityscape minimalism which abruptly and wildly careens into a bluntly Dassinesque violence. The organizing pun of the film—From the very first driving scenes we see in the film, it’s clear that the physical acts of driving a car are clearly intended to evoke submerged psychological drives—also owes much to Walter Hill’s 1978 film, The Driver.

Ultimately, there’s not enough meat on the film’s bones to make the jump Refn tries to make with the film (from existential romance to violent action), but its best moments do have a certain visceral grip.