Driven
By Peter John Gardner
Sly joins forces with Cliffhanger director Renny Harlin again with a script written by Stallone himself that takes him back to the racecar genre for another shot at injecting life into what is essentially a dead career at this point. Did it work? Of course not.
Stallone's getting older at this point in his career, so I'm starting to see a shift in the kind of roles that he's taking. In Driven, there is still the typical Stallone template of a hotshot, young upstart in sports that is receiving guidance from an old pro, mixed with the ol' "I'm not doing this anymore because of a tragic accident years ago" formula, but this time it's Stallone that's the old pro, which is a problem in itself because Stallone never comes across as a guy that's well-versed in anything.
He's also woefully miscast in a movie he wrote himself. Maybe I'm just being narrowminded, but Nascar always seemed like a rednecky kind of sport, and while Burt Reynolds is certainly believable in his part as a racing promoter, Stallone looks like he should be in the boxing ring instead of the pit.
Movies of this like never really did anything for me. This film falls into what I uncreatively call the car-genre, which includes other winners like Gone In 60 Seconds, Days of Thunder, and however many Fast and the Furious movies they're up to at this point. I can get into movies with lots of car chases (Vanishing Point, Death Proof). Days of Thunder was pretty good even if you can smell the fucking testosterone emanating from it as you pass by it in the video store, and I enjoyed Stallone's own Death Race 2000 just for the sheer hamminess of it all.
I understand other people's interest in cars, but like sports, it's one of those stereotypical male things that I never got into. I'm on my third car now, and each time I had to get a new one, my only request was it for to be able to take me from point A to point B without dying on me. I don't care about the make, model, color, or if it's "tricked out". I just want something with four wheels, an engine, and not shaped like a giant hot dog.
Cars are like anime. The good ones are from Japan, a lot of people are into them, but it's just not for me.
