DRIVE (Japan, 2002)
Directed by: Sabu
Starring: Shinichi Tsutsumi, Ko Shibasaki, Ren Osugi

"Drive is just this kind of black crime-caper comedy: blessed with a clever, complex script that would make Tarantino jealous, a stand-out cast of capable actors, incisive dialogue and many bleak yet hilarious moments you’ll be hard pressed to forget."

- Janick Neveu, Fantasia Film Festival

"Drive is a hilariously original movie, describing how some people are just destined to cross paths, no matter what the nature of their encounter might be."

— Brussels International Film Festival of Fantastic Film

For 15 years, writer/director/actor Sabu has been his own brand, making genre-defying movies that can only be called "Sabu films" — they don't fit in anywhere else. A specialized taste, he's finally crossed over with DRIVE. Racking up more loot at the box office than any of his previous films, it's like watching David Lynch direct Buster Keaton in a crime caper gone deeply awry.

Type-A salesman, Kenichi, is battling blinding headaches when he's car-jacked by a gang of crooks on the getaway after a bank job. They've been double-crossed by their two-faced pal, Mickey, who's made it out ahead of them with the cash, so they put a knife to Kenichi’s throat and scream, “Follow that car.” Big mistake. Stolidly refusing to break the traffic laws, Kenichi does everything but use hand signals as he putters after the speeding Mickey, who zips off into the land of “Never to be Seen Again”. Threats give way to the blame game, which gives way to the crooks and their hostage sitting around in a restaurant bemoaning their fate and trying to figure out what to do next.

Meanwhile, Mickey drops his car keys down a hole in the middle of nowhere and gets his arm stuck while rooting around after them. Suddenly things take a very weird turn as the sun sets, and dreams and nightmares move into the waking world, while our characters meet their destinies, one after the other. The humor in DRIVE is drier than the desert, Sabu’s specialty is putting the “dead” back into “deadpan”, but despite all the ghosts of Japan’s unquiet past, fantasy sequences, Rube Goldberg mise en scene and otherworldy twists of fate, DRIVE has a heart. It’s hard to find sometimes, and it occasionally looks a little bit black, but by the end, when Kenichi musters up the courage to talk to the obsessive-compulsive who stole his heart, you feel like this is one ride into the sunset that’s actually been earned.