The Driver – 1 star

I am a Walter Hill enthusiast. His scripts for The Getaway and The Drowning Pool are cynical, economical, hard-boiled masterworks. They don’t posture, so they never come off as anachronistic or showy.

He’s also adept with historical pieces. The Long Riders is a gem, his best and most complete film.

48 Hours is overlooked, known more as the vehicle for Eddie Murphy’s ascent, but in its brutal bones is a real beating heart, as can be seen in Mike from Better Call Saul imploring Jack Cates not to give up his gun.

Then there is The Warriors, a cult classic that somehow elides silliness despite a premise that would make lesser men chortle. Hill guides the Warriors through a comic book hellscape of late 70s NYC where all the other increasingly ridiculously attired gangs (one wears suspenders and roller skates, another sports black-and-white face paint and baseball bats) are after them and you can’t get enough.

Lin Manuel Miranda is readying it for Broadway.

Hill often gets the slightly condescending moniker “workmanlike” but to me, that just mean he merits more work.

He has some lazy slop (Extreme Prejudice), paycheck work (Red Heat), and ill fits (Brewster’s Millions), but even later in his career, he directed two string, taut historical features (Wild Bill, Geronimo: An American Legend).

So, what of The Driver, his second feature as writer-director?

Sadly, if ever there was a tonal failure made toxic by terrible casting, this is the picture.

Ryan O’Neal is the driver, a man-with-no-name type who is the hire for robbery getaways. He drives. That’s it. We know nothing of him, other than his simple rooming house existence and uber-laconic (or catatonic) demeanor.

I cannot think of a worst choice for this kind of role. Whereas Steve McQueen’s wry cool or Charles Bronson’s hard stoicism might have worked, O’Neal sleepwalks through this picture as a near mute. He doesn’t look cool. He looks like he has a fever and slight indigestion.

Hill could have paired the dyspeptic O’Neal with a romantic interest, someone who could draw him out.  Instead, he chose Isabel Adjani, then all of 23 years of age, and she decides to underplay the already monotone O’Neal. She’s barely more than a mannequin and nothing said between the two is interesting or illuminating. Bruce Dern, as the dogged detective obsessed with catching O’Neal, must have sensed the sleepy miens of his co-stars, so he gives an increasingly manic performance which borders on the comical. It doesn’t help that he sports Napoleon Dynamite’s hairstyle before it was ironic.

It’s not all casting. Hill seems bored by his story halfway through and things happen that make you go, “Wait. How did the cops know where the money would be? Did I fall asleep?”     

The car chases are fine, if routine and overlong. There is no sequence that approaches the virtuoso chases in The French Connection, Bullitt, or The Seven-Ups.

Pretty bad. On Youtube.