Remembering Mark Dacascos in ‘Drive’
It was the year 2000. I had just started my final year of university, and my excitement had reached an all-time high. Not because of my studies (I was reading Physics — a bad choice if ever there was one) but because I’d just spent the money I’d earned during the summer on a new computer, and this one came with a DVD drive.
These were the days before streaming video, Netflix, YouTube… if you wanted to watch a film, you had to rent it or buy it from a bricks-and-mortar store. What money I had left over from the purchase of my PC went on growing my nascent DVD collection. First the classics — Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Blade Runner. I was at university, after all, and there would be people coming round to my room to see what I had on the shelves. I didn’t have a ‘Pulp Fiction’ poster on my door, but a cool collection of films was the next best thing.
When my funds ran low I turned to the bargain bin. The DVDs of films I’d never heard of before, the ones that had sneaked out onto the market without ever gracing the cinemas. The 1997 film ‘Drive’ was one of those, and I bought it not because the plot looked interesting, or because I recognised the names of the stars involved, but because it had a lot of kung fu.
Kung fu was all the rage back then — at least in my social circle. We worshipped ‘The Matrix’ — I even saw one fellow stalking the shadowy halls of the campus wearing a long black leather coat, and another, similarly-attired, had a hole cut out of the top, presumably to allow a sword to be sheathed there (I suppose that meant he was paying homage to ‘Blade 2’ more than anything). Copies of Jackie Chan’s ‘Drunken Master’ were in circulation, and we all dreamt of being that guy who could take on the hordes with his bare hands.
‘Drive’ then possessed a certain social cachet. The DVD format was perfect for this — we could skip ahead to the fight scenes, missing the plot-related points in the film, which, to us, were an unnecessary distraction. The fights have been burned into my memory, but I could not for the life of me tell you who the different characters were, or even what they were hoping to accomplish in the film. If you want to know what the story was I recommend the summary here on Wikipedia — but to think in terms of plot would be to miss the greater import of the film itself.
The film is, essentially, a vehicle for the talents of Mark Dacascos, as well as for the film’s other kung fu artists and stunts people who appear most often clad in riot armour and black masks, and the fight choreographer — in other words, the energy and impetus behind the film is very much in line with ‘John Wick’, of which more in a moment.
It is not the film itself that I remember and cherish. But that’s not to take away from the mechanics at its heart. The villains are relentless, not to mention heartless, and that’s what you want from a film like this. Dacascos, who is not the world’s strongest character actor, portrays some kind of human-cyborg military project, and thus his acting short-comings are cleverly hidden. He is on the run from the bad guys, you can guess that much, but along for the ride are both Kadeem Hardison and Brittany Murphy. Their characters add heart in the case of Hardison (he is given the emotional end of the story to carry, though in the original release much of this is cut and he seems two-dimensional; in the superior extended cut the more heart-warming of his scenes are restored, adding greatly to the film), and a wonderful, light-hearted zaniness in the case of Brittany Murphy.
Murphy here is a revelation. She might have been introduced to add two things to the film: first, a damsel in distress, as Dacascos sometimes has to race furiously around the scene to keep her out of danger; secondly, comic relief to set off the po-faced seriousness of Dacascos and the aggrieved seriousness of Hardison. But she steals every scene she’s in, and for good reason: she re-crafts her character to become one of us, and I mean that in the most literal sense. She never shows any fear, almost as if her character knows this is all make-believe. But more than that: she looks like she’s enjoying the fight sequences every bit as much as the film’s cult following would have done.
As a viewer, I would have given anything to find myself by her side in that film. She was one of the first serious crushes of my adult life (not just Murphy, but her character here — and in some ways the two were inseparable). When I learnt of the tragic death of this dazzling screen presence back in 2009, the news came as a crushing blow.
But now I want to turn to the fight sequences in ‘Drive.’ Without a doubt, they are the reason that this film is so beloved by those in the know (for a straight-to-video affair, it is well-ranked on IMDB, with an average score of 6.9 from nearly 5,000 votes, and that makes it much, much better than the final season of Game of Thrones). There is great variety in the fights — no two take place in the same way or the same location, and Mark Dacascos is as clever at utilising what is at hand as, well, John Wick.
If anything, this film is where ‘John Wick’ has its roots. For me, the stand-out scene in ‘John Wick 3: Parabellum’, comes right at the start. That scene in the public library is destined to become legendary. The same is true of the inventiveness here in ‘Drive’. In my favourite fight scene, a group of identikit thugs descend on Mark Dacascos in his motel room. Armed with cattle prods, they launch themselves at our hero, trying to jab at him and shock him into submission. But they have not reckoned for Dacascos’s creativity: he takes a knife, and slits the boot laces of one of his assailants, before tripping him up and stealing his boots.
And then: the moment. There is a stand-off, Dacascos on one side of the cramped little room with its ugly wallpaper and cheap framed print on the wall; the thugs are on the other side, preparing themselves for the onslaught. Dacascos fits the boots over his hands, adopts the kung-fu pose, and then beckons the others forth… by using the ‘come on, then’ sign that Keanu Reeves made famous in the training scene opposite Laurence Fishburne in ‘The Matrix.’ You know, in that movie which came out two years later.
Now, I’m not going to suggest that anything in ‘Drive’ influenced anything in ‘The Matrix’. The same hand gesture was a staple of old Hong Kong kung fu movies, for one thing, and for another it’s much more likely that ‘Drive’ inspired the many-on-one fight sequences found in Jason Statham’s ‘The Transporter’ of 2002 (IMDB rating 6.8… just saying).
But you can imagine my gratification when I took my wife to the cinema last week to see the latest instalment in the ‘John Wick’ saga, and saw Mark Dacascos as the sushi assassin Zero.
“I know that guy!” I said — though not immediately, as it took a few minutes for me to figure out why those eyes were so familiar. My wife shushed me, as well she might, but the knowledge that I was watching the star of my favourite low-budget, straight-to-video action movie, up there on the big screen opposite the legendary Keanu Reeves — well, it made me happy.
And that’s why I remembered Mark Dacascos in ‘Drive’ the other day. If you haven’t seen it, but you loved ‘John Wick 3: Parabellum’, do yourself a favour and check it out. You won’t be sorry.
