Crash and Burn!!!!!!!!!

Rating: 1/10 (24 April 2001)

Burt Reynolds has already starred in two of the worst car movies ever made (`Stroker Ace' and `The Cannonball Run 2'). Well congratulations, Burt, on number three.
`Driven' is so awful on so many levels, it's actually hard to remember all of them after the movie's over. First of all, there's the characters. They could be cardboard cutouts, except someone forgot to cut them out: in other words, although their lives are as clichéd as their dialogue, we're not even given enough details about them to fully form the clichés.

To start with, there's Stallone's character, an ex racecar driver who blew it on the track and at home. He apparently caused some big accident which ruined his career, and which may or may not have paralysed his old friend Burt Reynolds, who now owns a racing team. The exact details are never made clear. He also apparently walked out on his wife leaving her bitter and resentful, although again, exactly what happened is never explained. Then there's Jimmy Bly, played by the guy from `Remember the Titant', the hot young driver who just can't take the pressure because he's not `doing it for himself', although exactly why he can't take the pressure is again, never fully explained. And then there's Simone, played (nominally) by Estella Warren, who supposedly works for this other driver but never appears to actually do anything. Oh yeah, and there's a journalist woman, played by nobody, who falls for Sly after he woos her over a hot game of pool, a cinematic device that hasn't been used in, oh, about three days.

Part of the problem is that the characters never get to interact with each other for more than about three seconds before being interrupted by either another gratuitous title card (Japan: Three Days Before the Race, Italy: Six Minutes Before The Race, etc) or another car accident in which bad CGI junk flies toward the camera and Renny Harlin indulges in sub-John Woo camera tricks which don't work.
Then there's the acting. Stallone and Reynolds look awful. Stallone's face resembles a grocery bag that's been kicked around a parking lot for a couple of hours. Burt's had so many facelifts his skin no longer moves. Not that the script helps, but both are awful. So are Estella Warren and the guy from 'Remember the Titans': there's this hillarious scene where they flirt by a swimming pool and since neither has any charisma to speak of, they just talk in monotones, looking morosely pretty, and the overall effect is like watching a CK One ad in hell. Only Gina Gershon comes out of it OK, using her one decently-written scene as Sly's ex-wife where she rages at him to show us she can act. After that, her character turns into a TURBOBITCH!!!!!! And she gamely plays along, chewing the scenery and wearing her TURBOBITCH!!!!!! hat with style.
But the funniest scene in the whole movie comes when there's a car crash during a race and the guy from `Remember the Titans' turns his car around, drives back up the track, dodging all the oncoming cars, pulls up and saves the other driver BEFORE the emergency crews get there. The car stuff doesn't even bear talking about: there are so many factual and continuity errors (you can't drive racecars on public roads, the tyres will explode, a car that's already exploded will not explode again because all the fuel in the fuel tanks will have burnt off, etc) that all the sequences are laughable. The CGI is really obvious too.
Perhaps Sly and Burt could team up again for `The Cannonball Run III': after all, a cannonball is only one step away from being a bomb, and they seem pretty damn good at making those.