The way I imagine this movie being dreamed up is something like this. Two guys sit down and run "Bullitt" a dozen times in a row, trying to figure out what made it such a lucrative hit. Then the two guys brainstorm. After a few hours, they have written on the blackboard: (1) car chase, (2) McQueen "cool". Then they wrote the movie.
(1) Car chases. There was a sublime high-speed car chase near the end of "Bullitt." There'd been nothing like it on the screen before. It left the viewer completely exhausted. In this movie you get two high-speed pursuits, one at the beginning and another at the end. As in "Bullitt", all the cars sound like they belong on the Indie 500. And if, in "Bullitt", tires shrieked and howled as the vehicles slid around sharp corners, here they shriek and howl even when the vehicles are moving straight ahead. The movie is also punctuated by a few getaways. O'Neal, the highly skilled and professional driver, evidently believes that the best way to leave the scene of a crime unobserved is to burn rubber, pull out into the street traffic, and zoom away, breaking every traffic law in existence.
(2) Cool. Steve McQueen was the epitome of cool in "Bullitt." He wore snazzy clothes, turtlenecks, and had a neat harness to carry his gun under his sports jacket. The way we knew McQueen was cool was that he didn't talk very much, and he had a habit of looking at the floor and raising his eyes up to gaze at someone else from under his brows. Here, O'Neal hardly talks at all. He's present from the first few minutes on but he doesn't have a line of dialog until 16 minutes have passed. And if McQueen tended seldom to address another, O'Neal's invariably blank face is aimed at the wall. Compared to O'Neal, McQueen overacted outrageously.
The dialog is similarly clipped and masculine. Ronee Blakely meets O'Neal in a bar as an intermediate between him and a gang of thieves who want to hire him as a driver. O'Neal: "Shooters." Blakely: "Yes." O'Neal: "I don't like guns." Blakely: "They're on their way up. They gave me three hundred just to get to you." O'Neal: "You did." Most of the other performers aren't given much to do. Isabelle Adjani appears in the first shot but her first lines don't come until after O'Neal's. There's an exception though. Bruce Dern as an unsympathetic cop given to bending rules because he sees his pursuit of O'Neal as a kind of game is very expressive. He informs his dialog with all sorts of surprising lilts. The screen lights up when he appears.
I don't know that the movie makes too much sense. In the first chase, O'Neal is being followed by half a dozen police cars, and he leads them one by one into collisions with various objects, after which the street is cleared and he waltzes away into the night. Don't the police use radios? The ending kind of eluded me too, but maybe I missed something.
You know -- come to think of it, the writers must have seen more of McQueen's movies than just "Bullitt." In Pekinpah's "The Getaway," there's an engaging scene in which McQueen searches through a train looking for a man with a bag full of money. (In "Bullitt" McQueen pushes his way through an airplane looking for a man running away with a lot of money.) Here, Bruce Dern does the searching.
It's not a terrible movie by any means. If you like well-staged car chases you'll love it. But I did get tired of O'Neal's steely expression the second time around. What was most appealing about McQueen's high quotient of cool is that it seemed to be part of his character. But here O'Neal seems to have been told to enact a role. There really are people who act like McQueen in "Bullitt," people whose cool facade is brittle enough for the character to be annoyed once in a while, to tell a friend to "shut up and drink your orange juice." But nobody in real life acts like O'Neal does in this movie. It's beyond belief and into sheer stylization.
Well, I didn't mean to go on with such a lengthy comparison between "Bullitt" and "The Driver" but the movie seems to invite it.
(1) Car chases. There was a sublime high-speed car chase near the end of "Bullitt." There'd been nothing like it on the screen before. It left the viewer completely exhausted. In this movie you get two high-speed pursuits, one at the beginning and another at the end. As in "Bullitt", all the cars sound like they belong on the Indie 500. And if, in "Bullitt", tires shrieked and howled as the vehicles slid around sharp corners, here they shriek and howl even when the vehicles are moving straight ahead. The movie is also punctuated by a few getaways. O'Neal, the highly skilled and professional driver, evidently believes that the best way to leave the scene of a crime unobserved is to burn rubber, pull out into the street traffic, and zoom away, breaking every traffic law in existence.
(2) Cool. Steve McQueen was the epitome of cool in "Bullitt." He wore snazzy clothes, turtlenecks, and had a neat harness to carry his gun under his sports jacket. The way we knew McQueen was cool was that he didn't talk very much, and he had a habit of looking at the floor and raising his eyes up to gaze at someone else from under his brows. Here, O'Neal hardly talks at all. He's present from the first few minutes on but he doesn't have a line of dialog until 16 minutes have passed. And if McQueen tended seldom to address another, O'Neal's invariably blank face is aimed at the wall. Compared to O'Neal, McQueen overacted outrageously.
The dialog is similarly clipped and masculine. Ronee Blakely meets O'Neal in a bar as an intermediate between him and a gang of thieves who want to hire him as a driver. O'Neal: "Shooters." Blakely: "Yes." O'Neal: "I don't like guns." Blakely: "They're on their way up. They gave me three hundred just to get to you." O'Neal: "You did." Most of the other performers aren't given much to do. Isabelle Adjani appears in the first shot but her first lines don't come until after O'Neal's. There's an exception though. Bruce Dern as an unsympathetic cop given to bending rules because he sees his pursuit of O'Neal as a kind of game is very expressive. He informs his dialog with all sorts of surprising lilts. The screen lights up when he appears.
I don't know that the movie makes too much sense. In the first chase, O'Neal is being followed by half a dozen police cars, and he leads them one by one into collisions with various objects, after which the street is cleared and he waltzes away into the night. Don't the police use radios? The ending kind of eluded me too, but maybe I missed something.
You know -- come to think of it, the writers must have seen more of McQueen's movies than just "Bullitt." In Pekinpah's "The Getaway," there's an engaging scene in which McQueen searches through a train looking for a man with a bag full of money. (In "Bullitt" McQueen pushes his way through an airplane looking for a man running away with a lot of money.) Here, Bruce Dern does the searching.
It's not a terrible movie by any means. If you like well-staged car chases you'll love it. But I did get tired of O'Neal's steely expression the second time around. What was most appealing about McQueen's high quotient of cool is that it seemed to be part of his character. But here O'Neal seems to have been told to enact a role. There really are people who act like McQueen in "Bullitt," people whose cool facade is brittle enough for the character to be annoyed once in a while, to tell a friend to "shut up and drink your orange juice." But nobody in real life acts like O'Neal does in this movie. It's beyond belief and into sheer stylization.
Well, I didn't mean to go on with such a lengthy comparison between "Bullitt" and "The Driver" but the movie seems to invite it.