Driven is a 2001 sports action film about a young hot shot driver in the middle of a championship season who is coming apart at the seams, needing a mentor to give him guidance.
The success of any sports movie is never the sport. It’s always the people. If we care about the players or athletes or drivers then we care about the story, yet the mistake so many of these movies make is thinking that it’s the action on the field or in the ring or on the court or the track that keeps up hooked. Sure, all that matters, we want to see the hero(es) win the day, but without a little heart behind it, we just don’t care. It’s why Rocky is as good as it is. Yo, Adrian!
And it’s one reason why director Renny Harlin‘s 2001 racing movie Driven, a stylistic fast-paced action film with a very limited attention span, can’t get cross the finish line. It wants to be a character-driven thriller with big, bold, fast and furious characters living on the edge, but even with some pretty impressive racing footage (taken from actual events from the late 90s), somehow has no urgency, Harlin simply unable reign it in enough to give it any significance. Let’s break it down.
The story centers around three open-wheel Champ Car drivers, the first being Beau Brandenburg (Til Schweiger), an ice-cold long-time racer and current champion, trying to hold on to his lead, deciding to break off his engagement to puffy lipped fiancée Sophia Simone (Estella Warren) because, well, she’s a distraction, being all endlessly supportive and runway model beautiful. Guess how long it takes him to realize that’s a mistake. Did you guess about four minutes? You should really guess about four minutes.
Either way, she doesn’t take the news well, slinking over to the pit of hot-right-now rookie driver Jimmie Bly (Kip Pardue), who’s having a stellar year but having trouble dealing with the pressure, needing a way to find some focus. And it’s easy to see why. How could any young man stand constant adoration from young attractive women in tight t-shirts trying to kiss them all the time? Obviously, Sophia must be answer, and he’s got the pedal to the medal in making it work. It’s not helped though by his brother/manager Demille (Robert Sean Leonard) who is in his face constantly to play the game off the track to earn a chance for greatness, telling Jimmie that Sophia is not to be trusted. If your gut is telling you that Demille sounds kinda squirrely, then you have good guts.
Bly’s team manager is Carl Henry (Burt Reynolds), a paraplegic who thinks he’s got a plan to help the newbie get his footing. He calls in Joe Tanto (Sylvester Stallone), a retired former champion who knows the circuit better than anyone, and thinks he’s back to win races but discovers Henry wants him only as a tool to move Bly to the front. To complicate things even further, the third driver on Henry’s team is handsome Memo Moreno (Cristián de la Fuente), who – inhale – is now married to Joe’s ex-wife Cathy (Gina Gershon), who seems to still have a thing for Joe though flaunts Memo even when Lucretia Clan (Stacy Edwards), a journalist covering the story shows up and draws Joe’s attention, putting the girls in cat fight corners where the two squabble for rights to Joe’s eye though only for a short bit as something happens that suddenly seems to put Cathy back on the track for Memo and honestly, it doesn’t matter because the women here are only window dressing. Exhale. Let’s just say Driven isn’t passing the Bechdel test any time soon.
Stallone wrote the screenplay, initially hoping to make a biopic about legendary Brazilian Formula One racer Ayrton Senna, but setbacks had him reworking the whole project into fiction, and unfortunately, tapping him dry of inspiration, the film a mess of overused tropes and racing clichés. That includes the relationship between Henry and Tanto, the classic older manager and rebel driver at odds who can’t see eye to eye even as they struggle for the same thing. Despite this, both Reynolds and Stallone are the two best things going, with Stallone especially carrying the weight of the story, shadows of his Rocky soaked into every corner of his performance. He must have known that, nay, counted on it. His constant motivational quips for Jimmie seem like bits swept up from the editing room floor after someone cut a Rocky sequel.
Everyone else is just bad, starting with Harlin, who doesn’t seem to understand what makes this type of racing fun to watch for fans. Treating the whole thing like an MTV beach party, he points his camera at every scantily-clad girl (from every angle) whenever he can, giving superficial video game quality attention to the cars themselves, even as a few good sequences click. If you’ve seen Ron Howard‘s excellent Rush (2013), then you know how it’s done right, but Harlin is far more interested in sex appeal than genuine car enthusiasm. It’s a poor choice that ultimately ruins the experience. How much so? Let me tell you.
At one point, at a gala event where new racing cars are on display, Jimmie and Beau have a tiff over Sophia, as men are want to do in such occasions, and when she chooses her side, Jimmie angrily hops into one of the cars (an open-wheel 195 mph racing car mind you) and speeds off into the city of Chicago. Guess who takes after him in another racer? Did you say, “The Police?” No. That’s wrong. It’s Joe.
What follows is a far-too-long sequence of these two speedsters tearing up the city streets (at one point blowing past a young blonde woman in a short dress, which Harlin makes sure to linger on in slow motion as we all get a long look at her skimpy undies). The cars barrel through heavy traffic at top speed, narrowly causing untold havoc, leaving cops apparently helpless as none show up, even when they finally stop and have a heated chat in the middle of the road. It’s so absurdly illogical and inconceivable, it’s almost daring, but is edited so plainly, layered with – as is much of the film – a generic lifeless soundtrack that it’s just boring. Comparing this to a moment later when a driver ends up in a pool of water soaked in spilled fuel that is already on fire – as two others try to rescue him – and you get the idea that what might have looked good on paper just didn’t transfer well to screen.
Then there’s the actors, all of whom who are left to spout cartoon dialogue in a rapid fire editing style that leaves the film breathless, and not in a good way. Pardue is woefully miscast and is way out of his league here, never once convincing as a world class rookie racer, though it’s not really his fault as the film leaves him with nothing to do but whine and pout his way around the track. He’s not alone though, as just about everything anyone says to each other comes off flat and false, with exception to Stallone who’s made a career of making this sort of thing work.
Furthermore, the film abandons any hope for honest romance, keeping the women to the peripheral and on screen only when it’s time to cheer, cry or seduce and worse, the buddy-buddy mentor thing meant to be built between Joe and Jimmie is almost non-existent, the movie hardly spending more than a few minutes on developing any kind of bond, which leaves their partnership in the final moments hopelessly deflated. A total spinout.
So where’s that leave us? Well, smack dab in the middle of the greatest worst racing movie ever made, and in a lot of ways, that makes this kind of a must see. Fans of open-wheel racing might find some fun too as a slew of real-world Champ Car drivers play themselves on camera, though have no impact on the story, the film a tightly confined story that includes only these three drivers. With all the talent behind the project, and great potential to make a story about endurance and overcoming fear, the film is all the more frustrating (entertaining?) as it sticks to obvious competitive back and forth’s and endless cutaways of racing standards. Get ready for shot after shot of close ups of people yelling into headsets. Tom Cruise‘s Days of Thunder is only marginally better than this, but at least had some characters worth rooting for. Even with a full tank, Driven sputters and spins into the wall. No pit crew can save it but the one thing all fans of racing like best is a big crash. This is certainly one.