I was afraid Sylvester
Stallone's long-awaited racing epic 'Driven' would be nothing
more than Rocky Balboa meets 'Days of Thunder'.
It is far worse than that.
The finished product feels more like Speed Racer enters 'The Matrix' on crack.
Stallone plays Joe Tanto, a retired driver who's called back into action by wheelchair confined car owner Frank Williams - I mean Carl Henry (Burt Reynolds) - to help rookie driver Jimmy Bly (Kip Pardue) win the 'World Championship'. Bly, a pimply faced teenager, sits in one of the best race cars in the series and has won a couple of races, but seemingly has no talent or charisma and tends to wet his pants every time chief rival Beau Brandenburg (Til Schwiger) appears in his mirrors.
Brandenburg, a Michael Schumacher look alike, mumbles some unintelligible lines in a heavy German accent while breaking up with love interest Sophia (Estella Warren) in the early scenes. Sophia, predictably winds up with Jimmy Bly for the next few dozen scenes until her dramatic reconciliation with Schui - I mean Brandenburg - in front of a room full of sponsors at a cocktail party.
Baby Bly throws a tantrum, then jumps in a Champ Car and - without benefit of an on-board starter - drives away in a huff. Tanto, for some strange reason, decides to jump in another Champ Car and chase down the jilted lover. What follows is a bizarre, computer generated chase scene through the streets of downtown Chicago that ends in a 5 minute 'get your s*** together' pep talk from Stallone while police sirens wail in the distance.
The cops never arrive, so we don't get to see these two mopes carted off to Chicago Police Headquarters at 11th and State to be beaten like the dogs they are.
Too bad.
Continuing the driver 'wife swapping' theme, Stallones ex-wife Cathy (Gina Gershon) is married to the driver he replaces on Burt Reynold's super race team. His name is - get this - Memo Moreno. Hey, 'Cole Trickle' was already taken, right? In one incongruous scene, both Stallone and Moreno (Cristian de la Fuente) are walking to the pits wearing their driver suits, even though Memo has theoretically been bounced up to the cheap seats with Joe Tanto's return.
Memo's cheerful demeanor is reminiscent of the character 'Dead Meat' in the film 'Hot Shots' and sure enough, he's the victim of the most savage of the film's crash scenes later on.
Other characters in 'Driven' include Jimmy Bly's agent brother (Robert Sean Leonard), a smarmy weasel who guides, then torpedoes his baby brother's career. Stacy Edwards plays a reporter who looks to Joe Tanto for an explanation of why men race. She's similar to the Louise Frederickson character in 'Grand Prix', but philosophy isn't one of this film's strong points.
Screenwriter Stallone borrows heavily from several previous releases. Drivers trading girlfriends was a staple in 'Winning', 'Grand Prix' and several other racing movies. The 'over the banked curve and into the forest' crash scene was also borrowed from 'Grand Prix'. Joe Tanto's habit of humming when in high stress situations is right out of 'The Right Stuff' and the 'through the streets' chase scene was first seen in 'The Blues Brothers', not to mention the Danny Sullivan episode of 'Miami Vice'.
'Driven' isn't a complete waste of time. The ritualistic countdown to the start of the season's climactic race at Detroit (also an homage to 'Grand Prix') is quite good. After enduring nearly 2 hours of nonsense by then, it almost seemed like the scene was shot by another director and one regrets that the rest of the film wasn't as good.
Where 'Grand Prix', 'LeMans' and more recently the documentary 'Super Speedway' feature incredibly realistic and dramatic on-board camera shots, 'Driven' relies heavily on computer generated animation and slow motion for its racing scenes, giving it a cartoonish, video game feel. What in-car footage is used actually accomplishes the difficult task of making the Champ Car of 2000 look slow.
The exaggerated crash scenes, frighteningly un-survivable in most cases, look like something out of Play Station or an arcade game. In fact, Play Station billboards are abundant at the fantasy 'German Grand Prix' racing circuit late in the film. When they crash, the cars rarely stay between the fences, easily flying over them and breaking up into little pieces on the way.
One particularly offensive incident shows a piece of crash debris - a wheel and tire with the jagged front suspension still attached - flying over the debris fence and into the grandstand. The fleet-footed spectators quickly move out of the way and no one is injured, but the similarity to the gruesome incident at Charlotte two years ago is shocking and it makes you wonder what CART was thinking when they got involved with this disaster.
The racing scenes are silly and unrealistic. The dialogue is painful and childish. None of the characters seem to know anything about racing. Jimmy Bly keeps studying his laptop computer to find out why he's losing, but he's not looking at telemetry, he's looking at video game simulations and circuit diagrams (including an outline of the egg-shaped oval at Darlington). The fictional 'German Grand Prix' was filmed out in the country somewhere or on someone's test track and features a single lane, high banked left hand curve edged in Armco instead of concrete.
We won't even talk about the scene where a crashed car with a methanol leak explodes in a ball of flame after being touched off by a flaming tree branch - while sitting in three feet of water.
'Driven' is not a 'real' racing film. Stallone has geared it towards 5th graders and WWF refugees, not racing fans. 'Days of Thunder', for all its faults, has been credited with raising NASCAR's visibility with the public. 'Driven's' ambiguous 'World Championship' will probably not fill seats at CART events. After all, would you buy a ticket to a race where you could be showered with debris at any moment?
Thankfully, the words CART and FedEx Championship are not spoken in the film and the cars are never identified as Champ Cars (or anything else for that matter) but you have to believe Bernie Ecclestone will just roar with laughter when he sees the reviews.
Steve McQueen can continue to rest in peace but if they want to delay joining him, James Garner and John Frankenheimer should avoid any theatre showing this film. After seeing 'Driven', I'm more grateful than ever that these fine men gave us the two best movies that will ever be produced about our sport.
After seeing the closing scenes of 'Downhill Racer' on a cable channel this morning, I'm reminded of how good a sports movie can be. The contrasts with 'Driven' are monumental.
That sigh of relief you heard probably came from Al Pacino. There's finally something worse than 'Bobby Deerfield' out there.
-Paul Zimmermann