Great opening scene, followed by a terrible movie. They tried so hard to make the driver one of those quiet mysterious types that he ends up looking mentally retarded. Pretty much every interaction he has with other people strengthens the autism diagnosis. That would be ok, if he had a Rainman kind of autism, but he doesn't. His incompetence in almost every thing he does in this movie gets a couple of people killed and destroys any chance he has of getting the girl. So he's a great driver, and other than that, pretty useless.
It's not just the main character that annoyed me. The romance scenes in the film are painful to watch. The neighbour is on the scene for a minute or so before you get to hear emotion inspiring music while he stares at her with his dead eyes, and worse, not long later you get a montage with picnics and find out that he is aspiring to be her kid's new daddy. The kid has an ex-con dad who has just been released, and who the mother still gets on with, but this doesn't seem like a problem. This director swerved so hard around this cliche he crashed into a wall.
It's also a failure as a car chase movie. You get to see some great shots/moments with cars, but they are interspersed with brutal reminders that this is just a movie, and not a great one. For example, you get to see a mustang getting caught (and fast) by a Chrysler 300, frantically dodging cars on a road with not many cars, spinning to face the 300, maintaing high speed in reverse, spinning back again without doing anything to justify the move, to finally have the 300 spin and wreck for no particular reason. For something called "Drive" I'd really expect more than just good looks in a car chase.
Finally, as a crime thriller it blows hard. The protagonist shows utter ineptitude at predicting what the results of any of his actions will be, and basically gets several friends killed. The gangsters in the movie have such cheesy, cliched dialogue, and illogical reactions to circumstance, it's plainly obvious there was no research of any kind put into the movie's subject matter.
Overall, the movie is a failed attempt to be an original, classy, stylish action thriller. It has a few decent stylish moments, but these are heavily outweighed by its awkwardness and lack of common sense in every respect. Not worth the time.

When I was a kid my two older sisters would go nuts whenever this came on TV. I soon learned to find something better to do during the Wizard of Oz. As a young boy I found the lion to be a pathetic excuse for the king of the jungle. The tin man for me had to compare with the terminator and disgusted me, and Dorothy was a girl (yuk), who I always thought was butt ugly. I did like the wicked witch under the house part. Those are the characters I remember, because I haven't watched it as an adult, and could think of a million more fun things to do. I'm giving it 30 for the yellow brick road and the witch, which I do remember well and were very striking images. Pretty much everything else sucked, and I think for modern children with modern attitudes this movie can't compete with new material. A five year old in 2010 would tell that lion to grow a pair and change channel.