Sometimes a movie with a dollar bin pedigree and hardly even a Letterboxd review worth excerpting for promotional purposes rises to the top and pummels you with a boot-fisted barrage of pure adrenaline-fueled joy. Drive (1997) is that movie.

Part of the joy of programming movies for Hyperreal Hotel, the weekly outing we’ve been running with Hyperreal Film Club for about a year and a half now, is sifting through the wide world of cinema to find an example of a type of thing that has some quarter turn towards the sublime. Truck Turner with Isaac Hayes as the feline-loving bounty hunter facing off against the vicious madam Nichelle Nichols, Green Snake with its reworking of what wuxia had been up to that point, Speed Racer as unfairly failed blockbuster spectacle… and here, with Drive, a genuine jewel in the paste crown of direct-to-video actioners. There’s thousands of these to sift through in a Wal-Mart pile, but we’re here to assure you that this crew spun the divine dial, left it twisting, and walked away.

The actors and filmmakers at the wheel of this movie effortlessly mash some William Gibson-level warring faceless global corp. technobabble with next-level fight choreography and stunning set pieces for a truly thrilling ride. Mark Dacascos, who you probably either know from John Wick 3 or from wide-eye wilding out about secret ingredients on Iron Chef, is one of the dopest to ever strike a pose. Kadeem Hardison, character actor supreme and coming off one of the biggest roles of his 90+ credits in 1995’s Vampire in Brooklyn, plays the non-cop buddy cop par excellence, and Brittany Murphy rounds out our central throuple with signature gun-toting reclaimed manic pixie dream girl abandon. (Sidenote: lest we forget the dreams made and destroyed for every single frame of these luminous images we consume like candy, hundreds of actresses auditioned for the role of Deliverance Bodine before Murphy walked in last and erased them all off the map.)

As I learned when poking around to write this piece, this honestly quite fascinating product of a flick is mostly consigned to the internet void, and primary sources were also basically non-existent apart from a reunion audio track included with the 2021 Blu-Ray release by MVD Rewind Collection. Director Steve Wang is known mostly for something called The Guyver, another human-technowhatsit hybrid actioner, as well as some Power Rangers and Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight outings in the aughts. Turns out the whole team mostly emerges from this realm, with writer Scott Phillips — who it’s nice to think popped back up mostly to crack a cold one and reminisce about what must have been some deeply stoned late night sessions imagining boot hands — also running scripting duties on Kamen Rider. (He also wrote something called Wedding Slashers which is… a great title.) Rounding out the dream team we’ve got Koichi Sakamoto on fight choreography, one of the leads at Alpha Stunts PR Action Unit, the folks responsible for every punch you’ve ever seen thrown by a Power Ranger. He apparently also loudly farts on the audio commentary for this movie which is very charming.

Another thing we’ve got in this movie is a top-tier study in stretching a dollar and delivering the goods for Hollywood peanuts. Again from the audio commentary, the squad jokes about the $3.5 million budget, saying: “Speaking of the budget, a running joke on set was the film was being produced by LBB Productions… that’s Low Budget Bastards for those in the know.” And dust to dust or set to set, the gothic-future Leung Corporate Headquarters set was sold to the now-defunct Prime Time Entertainment Network to repurpose for time-hopping crusader space opera Babylon 5, appearing on the show before Drive was even released. Spoiler alert, damn!

In an LA Times piece from November of 1998, two months after Rush Hour was released and twenty after the drop of Drive, two gems are to be found for the late-night hard-lookers. First, we’ve got this incredible sentence capped by a word I would have loved to see printed into a physical newspaper: “It is hard to believe anyone can resist Ratner, especially now that he has a hit movie to go with his schmoozemanship.” Second, we’re treated to this quote from the avowed Drive fan Rat-man himself: “I tell kids that if you have 90% talent and 10% drive, you’ll never be as successful as someone with 90% drive and 10% talent.” All I can say—anything 90% Drive can share handcuffs with me any day.

The Only Drive You Need