Mischief Maker wrote:

The plot is not the selling point of the movie.

The main character is not autistic, he's a man of few words who communicates volumes in silence.

The intensity of the action and violence is contextually magnified by the tense stillness that bookends it. Compare to Matrix 2's 20 minute car chase.

The Mask did allow the Driver to stalk Ron Perlman without being recognized.

The synth 80s score is a shout out to Michael Mann and the consummate professional protagonists of his films.

It's a film that trusts the audience to fill in the figure out the details that weren't necessary to put on screen. No "Lost my Lightsaber" reaction shots.

Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote:

Ever since the Godfather pictures, it seems, artiness has been working overtime as a kind of built-in alibi for many of the baser impulses in the audience –- various kinds of cynicism viewing corruption as inescapable, everyday, and deeply profound (e.g., Avatar, The Girlfriend Experience, Contagion), extreme violence as a function of specious and hypocritical morality (or, even worse, “sensitivity,” as in Drive – or, for that matter, The Passion of the Christ), gimmicky temporal structures (e.g., Tarantino, Memento, Babel) or fatuous psychologizing that are somehow supposed to dignify various forms of boorishness or nastiness (ranging from McQueen’s sexist complacencies and brutalities in Shame to von Trier’s dubious and ongoing validation of his own depression as a practical tool for coping with glitzy catastrophes and atrocities of his own making), and even the sort of Oscar-mongering that can cast a liberal activist (Woody Harrelson) as a racist thug (Rampart) to show us how “complex” the modern world is supposed to be.