A real "joy ride"

Rating: 7/10 (28 April 2001)

I didn't really expect much walking into Driven. In fact only one thing was on my mind, watching some killer racing scenes with some bad ass crashes. I certainly got what I wanted, not much more though.
The acting and story are fairly average. I'm not going to complain too much but it was certainly cheesy in many parts. Stallone does a decent job as an old, retired racer returning to help Kip Pardue get his sh*t together on the racetrack. I found him entertaining at best but his performance in this movie certainly doesn't compare to Rocky. Pardue's character is fairly bland and predictable, as is pretty much the entire plot. The rest of the cast fall in line the same way.
Now on to the good stuff. THE RACING! There certainly is enough of it. There's probably at least one race every 15 minutes in the movie. That's a good thing though, especially after gone in sixty seconds which I didn't think had nearly enough racing. The races are fast and exciting and the crashes are breathtaking, if not 100% realistic. Many people complain about the CGI being too obvious but let's put it this way, whenever there's a shot where there's no way in hell they could get a camera there, it's CG. All in all I thought they did a good job on the CG, it's a perspective that you wouldn't be able to get under any other circumstance and it's definatly fun to look at, even if you know it's fake.
One thing that bugged me was the constant jump cuts and jerky camera angles. During the races it's expected and didn't bother me but they even shot slow, talking scenes that way which can get pretty irritating. It's like that whole movie was just a big party in the editing room.
My recommendation is to go see it with your friends and don't analyze it too much, otherwise you'll ruin the fun. On a scale of 1 to 10 I give Driven a 7.