So much of American action filmmaking is dominated by master shots and reaction shots cut together to resemble something truly kinetic. The 118-minute runtime is chock full of sequences that flex both Dacascos’ martial arts mastery and Steve Wang’s mastery of the montage cut. Your mileage may vary depending on just how palatable that feel-good attitude comes off, but rest assured that the action sequences open the proceedings wide to the possibilities of grand-scale chaos. Or, rather, they’re forced to team up after a relentless assassin named Madison (John Pyper-Ferguson) is dispatched to retrieve the bio device.Īt its core, Drive is a weirdly feel-good movie about a couple of dudes just being dudes, learning about each other’s differences and pains, then working together to process those feelings through kicking, punching, shooting, looting, and joking. But after he meets Malik (Hardison), a bitter-yet-gregarious man on the outs with his wife, the duo team up. So, he flees to San Francisco to sell the device to a company in Los Angeles.

Special agent Toby Wong (Dacascos) is outfitted with some bio device that gives him superhuman powers, and Toby is worried that the Chinese government will want to exploit the device within him. The plot of Drive is rather simple again trying to capitalize on the structural certainty of American road movies that were popular during that time, and it takes place right after the Chinese government took back control of Hong Kong. Not to mention that Drive elided the American buddy action movie formula with high-flying, Hong Kong-styled hijinks in a way we rarely (if ever) see.

Combine that with Steve Wang’s skill for fluid action on a smaller scale, as well as Kadeem Hardison’s capability to tap into the story’s dopey humor, and you have one of the more unique action entries to come out of the late 1990s. Way before actor, martial arts performer, and wisecracker Mark Dacascos signed up to kick John Wick’s ass in the third entry of the popular assassin movie series, he enlivened 1997’s Drive with his naïve, boyish charm and lethal fighting capabilities.

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