Ryan O'Neal plays a guy known as the driver.
A simplistic minimalistic, uninteresting loaf of a man, who has an incredibly good skill for driving and seemingly nothing else.
He takes hi-stake jobs, polls them off with little to no issue, collects huge sums of money and then presumably throws it in a river as we never see him doing anything with it.
There's a cop played by Bruce Dern who's trying to arrest this guy and constantly keeps bending rules around the law to do it.
He even hires a group of thugs that are captured on a different Steak-Out mission to try and sabotage the driver into revealing himself.
But it doesn't work out as the driver was onto his truck from the start. And was therefor able to screw everybody over before ending up in a chase with one of the other thug who wasn't allowed to join the original set up heist because of his poor attitude.
Oh and the fact he aims an incredibly large pistol at the driver's head.
There's also the illusion of a romance between the driver and this random woman who could have identified him in the first Heist. She's played by Isabelle Adjani and she's this kind of disinterested foreign girl who does odd jobs the various elements of the criminal underworld and yet somehow has no real connection to them. But no real connection to the ''honest'' World either.
I'd say she's an even bigger blank slate than The Driver which might explain why the to work out so well for each other.
I'd say they have good chemistry, but neither one of them has any emotions so it's kind of hard to say.
The actors work well with each other and they could have made a romance, but they didn't.
Probably worked out for the best as a romance between a sponge and deflated basketball doesn't make for very entertaining Cinema. I will say she looks fantastic in her hat. So she's got that going for.
I was originally quite interested with this movie. It's been on my watch-list for some time and I'm always a big old fan for heist films and car chasing action scenes.
But as the movie progressed. I just found myself being less and less captivated by anything I saw on screen.
There's nothing technically wrong with what being presented.
Everybody Plays their part well, but it doesn't really stick out.
As I mentioned above everyone's kind of neutered in their emotions.
They're not flamboyance, they're not ornate. They just kind of simmer in the middle and I just stopped caring about any of them towards the hour mark.
And I'm not exactly sure how they would be able to fix that for me either.
The whole film is trying to go for this minimalist approach where you just kind of taking the action and the general story without being bogged down in needles character drama or other Hollywood (filler) tropes you'd seen so many other movies, but it also means we just don't have that much investment.
Now I admit this is probably down to my own bias. I just might be in the wrong mindset or maybe I was expecting more out of it.
It's not a very long movie. It's only an hour and a half and I think I expected the bank heist to be the final point to the movie.
In some ways I kind of wish it was.
But I don't want to be too harsh on this film, is it reminds me an awful lot of the movie 'Thief' which has a similar premise of kind of neutral characters committing crimes and then having the last letter to turn into a completely different movie.
I guess here they don't actually do that, they just turned into another Heist movie for the driver and the Detective is searching for a big bag full of money that was being taken by a third-party as part of a money laundering scheme to clean up the original Heist.
I think what this movie needed was a sit-down scene between the driver, the player (that's the girl he's kind of hooked up with) and maybe a few of the other underworld cronies. Just kind of laying about disgusting something pointless.
Admittedly that would be adding filler to a movie that doesn't need it. But it might just give a bit of personalities in these blank wall sheet paper people.
Maybe I'm just asking too much and I keep hoping that there's some Tarantino approach to this movie arguably isn't needed.
It's satisfactory, just like the movie 'The Outfit'.
It's incredibly basic, default Hollywood Cinema and it went on to inspire a whole whack of video games. So I guess it has that going for it.
One of those games even had a cigar promotional supposedly. God how I wish I could find those. Even though they'd be well over 20 years old at this point and probably wouldn't taste like anything even if they were kept in good humidity.
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