Anthony Lane reacts at a gruesome scene in Drive, where Ryan Gosling's character stomps a villian's skull to a bloody pulp:
The people around me reacted with the eewrrgh sound that has become de rigueur in the viewing of violence, followed by the traditional hasty giggle to pop the tension; even those moviegoers who revel in such a sight, however, might usefully pause to inspect the kick of pleasure that it provokes. No doubt they will have seen much worse, and they will also know that a bursting brain is no more real than a game of Quidditch, yet what perturbs me about a film as careful and as intelligent as "Drive" is its manifest delusion that, in refusing to look away from the minutiae of nastiness, it is actually drawing us closer to the truth about pain.
Richard Brody sees a different lesson from the Danish director, Nicolas Winding Refn:
Refn doesn’t seem interested in pain but in its infliction—specifically, how blank-faced, soft-spoken people manage to commit mayhem and, at the moment of violent outburst, stay fixed on their plan and maintain a fearsome calm in the face of disgusting gore. … [I]t’s the notion of duplicity: the poker face as the key to success, and the suggestion that anyone who makes it in any walk of life, legit or not, does so as a real cool killer.
How the director describes his intent:
With Drive, the structure I wanted to do was basically based on Grimm’s Fairy Tales. So the first half of the movie is about two people who meet and fall in love, but it’s spiritual, it’s never physical, it’s maybe not even, in a sense, real. It’s the idea of higher love. And in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, when the tables turn and it’s time for the villains to be punished it’s always very visceral, very extreme.
Matthew Baldwin muses:
Drive instinctively understands something that’s been forgotten by the products of the Thrillaminute Factory: killing someone is an extraordinarily intimate act, possibly even more so than sex. After all, a person can fuck you repeatedly, but they can only kill you the once.
The Dish 