Car flick with Rocky speech.

Rating: 2/10 (19 June 2018)

If you can get through the first five minutes of this dope, I applaud you. Between the distorted images, upside down, the infernal flashes and inverted editing, the cinematography is as good as any bottom feeder could have made it. This thing, is so poorly filmed it's atrocious. Did the producers look at it at some point before ever releasing it ? Because it's bad. It's about as bad of shot movie as there is alongside phone-filmed 2016 Ben-Hur.
The plot, is absent. The characters are stereotyped, the dialogues have no substance, the racing is science fiction, at no point is the movie ever really about racing and I'm not sure it was about anything. It's not about relationships, not about business, or laws of gravity, it's just a silly flick I guess is aired around 11 pm. The names of the protagonists look like they were stolen out of a you know what kind of R-rated movie.Jesus could you find more tacky than Jimmy Bly and Joe Tanto ? The cast is awful, either too old or too inexperienced, too difficult to understand as well -- hey here's a thing, if you're hiring a german actor, can you actually find one that SOUNDS english ? I'm sorry but you can't hire an actor with an english as bad as Til Schweiger, poor guy could hardly speak. Stallone, look, I don't understand what he's saying. I really can't. I have no idea what he saying half the time.
But between the flying cars (which would immediately postpone the race), the drivers saving themselves from a car accident in a lake, seeing fans on a podium and then seeing them again on a podium in Tokyo (what? the chick was hot, not hard to recognize even at the back), go-fast around Chicago in a champ car without a helmet on and infested with subplots that go nowhere to a disjointed ending.
This is why you can't hire an acting crew and think you're going to kick-butt because they're all good looking. Guess what ? They're all good looking in the movie business ! You cannot direct a movie this way. You need actors who have charisma, know their role and can act. Driven doesn't provide that and instead proceeds itself in laugher. We know the theme, the old veteran who grooms the young kid, that was done years ago in Bull Durham. The movie is built too much around clips, quick shots of car girls, overview shots, because the content is too poor and goes missing. The CGI are obvious, champ cars do not crash like that or float over water by the way. The champ car staff is so awkward, there doesn't seem to be a trainer in there, only agents and girlfriends and again too many shots of beautiful women it's an invasion.
None of these actors really show any skill or belief in their part, haven't heard Pardue do anything since that, Stallone did additional garbage and the rest vanished off. You don't understand the purpose in this junk, wether relationships or sportsmanship, you don't get i. Between that and the horrible soundtrack picked by a teenage 13 year old, you don't get it. The ex-wive comes off as spiteful but apparently everybody in the movie points to Tanto being the loser and the sabotage artist. You don't get anything from this movie.
At least it's great for advertising.