Sylvester Stallone’s career has been a bit weak in terms of box-office lately. Nobody saw Cop Land, Judge Dredd, or Get Carter. Its opening weekend, Driven made #1, but so far has made a little bit more than $20 million at the box office in around two weeks. That’s not bad considering how competitive movies are in the summer time, but when you look at The Mummy Returns making over $70 million its opening weekend…

Driven is about a young up-and-coming racer who has just lost a recent race after having a big winning streak. Burt Reynolds hires Sylvester Stallone to train the young racer for the upcoming matches because the World Championship race is coming soon.

For the record, I really don’t like racing. I enjoy playing video games like Cruisin’ USA or Crazy Taxi, but you’re never going to catch me watching a NASCAR racing program on TV. Why the hell did I see Driven then? That’s an excellent question…

The acting in Driven is almost uniformly bad. Everyone gives a soap opera level performance. Burt Reynolds gets to sit in a wheelchair and yell. The guy who plays the young racer is OK, his German nemesis is pretty bad. Stallone isn’t too bad in this movie and plays a more relaxed character instead of a macho killing machine (Rambo) or a scrappy bum trying to make it to the top (Rocky). As for the actresses, the girl who is Stallone’s love interest does a decent job, the blonde is OK, and Stallone’s ex-wife gives one of the worst acting performances I’ve ever seen.

Stallone wrote the script for this movie and it generally sucks. He can do much better than this… I watched the original Rocky the other day and that film had an excellent script. Half of the dialogue in the movie is said by fucking announcers-- ANNOUNCERS: "Uh, oh, looks like he’s in trouble. Remember when his wife left him?" "I don’t think he’s ever recovered!". Although I enjoyed some of the scenes about the romantic relationships between some of the characters, most of the script is watching races. L-o-n-g races. At least half the movie is just watching racing scenes. It’s sometimes difficult to tell which character is in which car, but I found it easier to tell from the product placements plastered everywhere (There goes the Target car… Must be the bad guy!). The climax involves Reynolds and Stallone humming, imitating racing noises. It’s one of the many unintentionally hilarious moments in this movie.

The directing by Renny Harlin is pretty obnoxious. There are a zillion cuts in this movie, even during dialogue scenes. Some directors can do this well, like Robert Rodriguez (watch Desperado or El Mariachi as an example of how to edit dialogue scenes with many cuts effectively). Literally, some guy will pop up, CUT, he’ll talk, CUT, he’ll brush his hair, CUT, a woman walks up, CUT, she blinks, CUT, she talks, CUT an extra kisses the guy on the cheek, CUT, etc. This is actually more likely the editor’s fault (although the director involves the blame since a director should collaborate on the cut with the editor), but a lot of shots in the movie make you scream out, “What the hell?” The opening shot of the Japanese swimming pool is very oddly done. I’m all for directing with weird angles and everything, but I personally think in any single shot you should be able to tell what the hell’s happening.

Driven has some of the worst CG I’ve seen. Technically, some of the stuff is well done… CG-generated wheels flying up into the air, for instance, look fine—except when they fall down and hit a bleacher, looking obviously pasted on. Some of the crashes look realistic, until they go into extreme slow motion. CG is used everywhere. Probably the worst single example of CG in this movie is a point-of-view shot from the driver’s seat during a race when it is raining. The rain-drops are computer-generated really poorly, looking more like a screen-saver running on top of a car window.

Driven could have been much, much worse. It was way too long at around 2 hours, but even as an hour and thirty minutes it feels bad. I enjoyed parts of the movie. Battlefield Earth was much more painful to sit through than Driven, although I still wouldn’t recommend Driven to anybody. Even as a rental, Driven would probably dissapoint. Driven crashes and burns worse than Dale Earnheart.

I give Driven *1/2 out of ****.

This happened about 1-2 months ago.

Redneck co-worker: "Hey man, did you hear about what happened today?"
Me: "You mean that bread I ate earlier? Yeah, it was good."
Redneck co-worker: "No man, Dale Earnhardt died."
Me: "And.....?"
Redneck Co-worker: "Don't you know who that is?"
Me: "No, but have I mentioned that the bread had raisons in it?."
Redneck Co-worker: "Man, he was my hero."

I've never actually been into race cars, except for when it came to laughing at rednecks who cried over some dumbass crashing.So, I went into Driven looking for an educational experience, much like when I saw Showgirls. All I seemed to learn about car races, is it they tend to include a shit load of bad scripting, bad acting, horrible directing, and stupid looking CGI effects, that were way over used.
One of the worst performances was from the German rival to our protagonist. i've seen a five-year old with no tongue, and bad stutter dilever lines better than this guy did. As far as females go, Gina Gershin aimed for a lack luster performance but didn't even get close. It's fuinny that the only time I've seen her give a good performance, was while she gave Elizabeth Berkeley an open-mouthed kiss in Showgirls.
Come to think of it, Showgirls was superior to this movie in several different ways. Each of those ways involve the female anatomy. So on that note, I think I'm going to go watch Show Girls.

I give * out of ****