Critics reviews

This structure, this car frame, lets Walter Hill, in his second film, reach the peak of his austere stylised purifications of Hollywood genres. The car acts as a form of catalyst that allows European art influences to be integrated, synthesised within Hollywood action norms. Its conflation of vehicle and driver, exterior and interior, marries action and thought.

Herein lies the beauty of what each character refers to as "the game." The double-crossings and betrayals that make up most of The Driver are elemental to Hill's gleaming neo-noir world, helping to forge intimate relationships that grow more intense as the film progresses. "I really like chasing you," The Detective confesses, and even though he never says it outright, it's clear that The Driver enjoys the pursuit.

Hill's filmmaking has a certain muscularity that, like John Carpenter's, draws favorable comparisons to Howard Hawks—and there is a workmanlike quality to the direction in "The Driver" that, combined with its interest in almost archetypically masculine professionals, makes the parallel seem apt. But "The Driver" is hardly brusque, and in fact seems to approach something more expressive at the same time that it strips stylization away...

Characters without names, deeds executed without words—Hill reduces everything to its archetypal basics in order to celebrate the nobility and exhilaration of work executed with precision. In the process, he delivers a film that—culminating with a cat-and-mouse duel of mounting suspense—combines existential anxiety and kinetic thrills in a meticulous manner that would make its protagonist proud.

An almost Zen-like genre exercise that combines his sensational action choreography with a minimalism worthy of Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï... The real stars of the film, however, are the masterful chase scenes through the sprawl of Los Angeles, frequently shot at bumper-level to amplify the sense of speed and danger.

The most direct manifestation of Walter Hill's continuous desire to remake Pickpocket -- his "models" are noir dwellers distilled to their quiddity, his musique concréte is the vroom-vroom of skidding chases... What's bottled up in the characters is released behind the wheel, and Hill transforms every car showdown into wonders of abstraction: deep-focus diagonals for streets lined with posts, the orange Mercedes-Benz dismantled in the strangely phosphorescent concrete garage.

The Driver is a writer's film only in the best sense: it was written as a film. Dialogue is relegated to its proper place, as only one tool among the range of expressive equipment at the director's disposal. Hill's camera placement, his cutting, his sense of décor, and his careful sequencing join his abstract dialogue as component parts of a single articulation.