Paced at a breakneck speed—the hero is at the steering wheel throughout the film—director Jenuse Mohamed’s Drive in Telugu brims over with latent anger, although we are never quite sure whose side Mohamed is really on: the trapped protagonist Jayadev Reddy (Aadhi Pinisetty) or the mysterious hacker who exposes Reddy’s Machiavellian plans to compromise the nation and threatens to blow the lid on Jayadev his posh well-groomed existence.
The thriller, more panicky than pacy doesn’t know know where to stop. Once the hero gets unstoppable on his swanky car, the narrative runs out of pace. We get to visit the hero’s past dealings, all shady and compromising. After a point, I wanted to know: do we really care about what happens to Jayadev or where he is going in his car in a foreign land where no cop seems to exist, unless the brief is to have a law enforcer on the screen just to remind us what could happen to Jayadev if his story was more sturdily scripted , or if the protagonist was played by a more sophisticated actor.
Aadhi Pinisetty looks like he wore a friend’s suit and decided to play ‘Tycoon Tycoon In Trauma’. Pinisetty fails to bail his character out of the crisis. We are curious to know what he plans to do to extricate himself from the crisis. But Jayadev is a cruel puppet in the hands of those who vandalize his life , hacking freely into his digital gadgets.
Penishetty playing the persecuted protagonist, doesn’t look at all hit by the crisis, except for the carefully planted beads of sweat on the forehead which tell us nothing about the character’s inner turmoil while they reveal everything about the film’s penchant for focussing on surface tension rather than on issues that could have made this more relevant than a dainty drizzly dip into the dangers of the digital domain.
As the plot plunges deeper into preposterousness we find ourselves laughing out loud at the utterly manufactured dramatic tension. A big fight in a church towards the end is particularly not cool, although it thinks it is. As for the promise of a sequel, for those who are holding their breath for it, please exhale. Drive would be a ride rather not taken. Watch Sohum Shah’s tension-on-automobile in Crazxy instead.
