Driven is a 2019 drama about a man with a plan involving politics, big business and narcotics.
Oh boy, does it try hard. You have to give director Nick Hamm and writer Colin Bateman little gold stickers for at least painting with the right colors, this take on the life and times of the infamous John DeLorean one full of promise and glitz but mostly feeling like a cardboard cutout of what it should be. You know the car, made iconic in cinema with the Back to the Future franchise, and perhaps if you know history, you also know his story, and yet none of what’s happening here feels authentic or worse, even all that interesting even as it commits to the thing with heaps of energy.
It begins with drugs. Jim Hoffman (Jason Sudeikis) is running them for a dealer named Morgan Hetrick (Michael Cudlitz), thinking it’s a ride to big money. However, after a return trip from South America with his wife Ellen (Judy Greer) and their children, the FBI puts that to stop. In steps Special Agent Tisa (Corey Stoll), who offers Hoffman a deal – switch to the other side and become an informant. With no choice, he accepts and ends up in Southern California with the plan to break apart Morgan’s little empire but instead finds himself neighbor to John DeLorean (Lee Pace), a much-publicized auto designer with a plan to unveil a new kind of car for the future. Thing is, DeLorean is a party man and soon enough drugs and money are on the table and Hoffman sees an opportunity.
Like most in this recent trend of revisiting the 80s, things are bit exaggerated and the first problem with Driven is how obvious that feels, though perhaps that is intentional, the filmmakers hoping to coat this in a kind of saturated nostalgia. Past that, if you like Sudeikis and his wide-eyed approach to both comedy and drama, then he’s reason why you’d probably want to give this a shot, he tapping into a bit of Matt Damon‘s efforts in the 2009 biopic The Informant! Either way, he at least seems to recognize the wink-wink-iness of it all and has some fun with the role.
Pace, too is well cast and goes to the ropes in trying to manufacture a kind of pseudo-DeLorean image that is certainly entertaining if not histrionic, a few meaningful encounters having some punch. Greer almost outrights steals the show though in another small part that will be mostly thankless, but she sure is good fun to watch. However, the film wants to be suspenseful and while the ingredients are kind of there, it simply can’t package it the way it intends. Told in flashback at a trail, it doesn’t really try to be entirely accurate and in the process, maybe thinking it a parallel to Martin Scorsese‘s 2013 The Wolf of Wall Street as it tracks madness in success and implosion, stalls, leaving this relatively toothless.
The real story is oft-told and readily available and in most ways, more compelling than these recent retellings – Framing John DeLorean is only a couple of months old – but you can’t really blame Hollywood for trying. The man behind the now beloved DeLorean is synonymous with epic fail and the broken American Dream, even as the car itself continues to speed on into legend. This take on that though, will not.