Don't be too fast to bring out the shotgun!

Rating: Null/10 (10 April 2002)

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Driven passed by UK cinemas with barely an eye flicker - it had a bit of an advertising budget behind it but lost out to fairly poor reviews and small attendances. As the film comes round for rental release, the story is the same. There aren't many copies out on the shelf and it's not in the rental charts.
So why bother? For a few reasons actually: this film reminded me in a few ways back to "The Fast and The Furious". It's got a good soundtrack, fast cars and some 'mean' camera angles. As a fan of Formula 1, I have however little knowledge of Indy Car racing. yet this seems fairly realistic!

Admittedly a lot of the rev sounds were blatantly from F1 cars and the crashs were OTT and the Special FX fake. Yet for every single special effect that you may have noticed, there would have been another 10 that you didn't. For instance a lot of the crowds and backdrops were computer generated; cars that weren't there were put in; and so on. All these have been done so professionally they are undetectable to the naked eye.

And although a film needs to glamourise its material, there is glamour in the racing world. There are Indy babes and beautiful girls and glamourous events, and Driven does a fairly good job of giving us a peak of this world.
On a performance note, Syl Stallone is not as poor as I often consider him. It is possible that he could be an Indy Car driver; in a way he reminds me of a slightly older David Coulthard. Burt Reynolds is good here, a fresh young cast give the impression that these could be real drivers, not to mention the real drivers themselves (!!) together with a few nice shots of Montoya and others (I noticed Jean Alesi and Jacques Villeneuve hiding somewhere in the credits). On the female side of the cast, Estella Warren hasn't got a pivotal role in the film but she is in quite a few scenes and adds a welcome and multi-dimensional addition to the cast... plus she's gorgeous as usual.
The way the film falls out is on subject matter and ending... it was obviously from the beginning we were talking about a plot going something like "young guy gets scared, needs guidance then kicks back and wins". And yes, I must conceed that Driven is about relationships as well as driving but to make a great movie in a little over 100 minutes there's not time for both - it has to be one or the other.
As said before, the realism is nice. They must have shot a lot of the film in conjunction with the actual-real-live races and this is nice because it adds to that realism. But a race takes 90 minutes in real time plus pre and post commentary so to try and cram races in to the span of a film is pushing it. Not that you need to show the whole race but five minute clips aren't enough to get a good feel of it all.
In summary, there are a few popints that drag the film down but a multitude that hold it back up. Maybe my love of F1 biases me towards the racing material of the film, but hey, there's fast cars, Estella and Gina, and some cracking cinematography (including some intricate and ingenious car mounted cameras). Even though the plot has to be constrained slightly but actual events and follow the film through to the logical conclusion, there is a plot. So you could say it's a bit like "The Fast and The Furious" except it's got a plot as well!!