Harlin Dropped The Ball And Left All The Best Things On The Cutting Room Floor.

Rating: 6/10 (14 February 2016)

Continuing my plan to watch every Sly Stallone movie in his filmography in order, I come to 2001's Driven.
Plot In A Paragraph: Talented young race-car driver Jimmy Bly (Kip Pardew) has started losing his focus and begins to slip in the race rankings. With much riding on Bly, car owner Carl Henry (a delightful Burt Reynolds) brings former racing star Joe Tanto (Stallone) on board to help Bly.
Once again (as with Get Carter) Sly wanted to make a character driven movie like Copland. What he ended up with was almost a supporting role in his own melodramatic soap opera.
His original script was 220 pages long, and according to director Renny Harlin's commentary, his first cut of the movie was 4 hours long. It's amazing he thought what was here, made the best movie. The 51 minutes of deleted footage included as special feature on DVD show a much better movie was left on the cutting room floor.
Rumour has it, the studio had lost confidence in Sly's ability to open a movie as the lead, and had a lot of his scenes cut, with more more focus put on the younger supporting characters. It's to the movies detriment Harlin went along with this, as Sly is the best thing in the movie.
As for the rest of the cast, with the exception of Burt Reynolds, Til Schweiger and Brent Briscoe the supporting cast are awful Kip Pardew isn't as bad as Robert Sean Leonard, Cristian De La Fuente, Gina Gerahon and Stacy Edwards but he is bad enough.
The coin trick scene is one of the coolest things in a Sly movie. However the car chase in the streets of Chicago, using the racing cars is one of the silliest things In any of Sly's movies.
I think if Sly directed this movie himself, it may have turned out very differently, as listening to his commentary on the DVD, you can tell he is dissatisfied that some good character driven scenes were cut. He later reused some of these ideas in 'Rocky Balboa'. My advice is to check out the deleted scenes on the DVD to see what could have been.
Stallone was asked in an interview about films he would wish had not done, and along with 'Rhinestone' and 'Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot', he listed this as one of them.