Driven (DVD) > Reviews > Stallone's New Movie

Author's product rating:   

Did you enjoy it?	Hated it
Story	Very ordinary
Characters / Performances	Unmemorable
Special Effects	Unmemorable
Soundtrack	Unmemorable

Advantages:	see review
Disadvantages:	see review

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

I should have known when it said that Sylvester Stallone had written this movie that it really wouldn't be worth watching. Well, ok I did know which is why I had no intention of watching it until someone came wandering into one of my labs late last night with the movie burnt onto a CD...gotta love the internet. Anyway, work forgotten(as usual) a group of us crowded around a terminal to watch Stallone et al. doing the Rocky thing all over again...

That is no word of exaggeration, this really was like watching Rocky again. Sylvester Stallone seems to have one script idea and just keeps changing the locations. There is not one original idea in this movie and when its not ripping off his own movies it is ripping off other people's namely Grand Prix and Days Of Thunder in this instance, although without such things as plot and character development but with CGI crashes aplenty to keep us interested. It doesn't work. But first the plot before I rip into this movie in the way it so richly deserves:

What little plot there is goes a little something like this...

Joe Tanto(Sylvester Stallone) is an ex-race car driver who is called out of retirement to be mentor for up and coming young rookie driver Jimmy Bly(Kip Pardue) in his quest to become master of the international CART circuit. His main rival is the stereotypically big-headed German driver Beau Brandenburg(Til Schweger) who comes complete with necessary blonde hottie girlfriend Sophia...well actually she kind of gravitates between the two main guys. Of course this wouldn't be enough to base a whole movie around would it so we add a few more complications. Jimmy's brother Demille(Robert Sean Leonard) is also his manager and is obsessed with making him a household name and we also throw in Burt Reynolds(audible groan at the sight of him) as the paraplegic owner of Jimmy's CART team. Ummm the whole plot is the racing and nothing else really, just a bunch of melodramatic subplots which are instantly forgettable...and I have instantly forgotten them. :oP~~

To say that this movie is awful would be to do it a dis-service. It is not that it is completely awful, but rather that it has its market to appeal to and I just happen not to be it. That said, none of the 10-15 other people I watched it with happened to be it either...

Its an action movie, its nothing more than that but the problem is that if you are going to base an entire movie solely around action then you have to make that action good. There are surely thse of us who watch motor racing just to see the crashes and that is basically what this movie provides as entertinment. You get lots of in-car shaky camera views which are meant to get the adrenaline pumping and then spectacular crashes resulting in massive explosions and flaming chunks of twisted metal flying everywhere. All this is accompanied by a raging heavy metal soundtrack and a general cachophany of noise and colour which rather than getting the heart pounding and the adrenaline pumping has you reaching for the volume control. Its all way too over the top to be watchable and for the effects to actually work they have to look a liitle bit 'real'. CGI animation is fine in some places, it looked good in things like Jurassic Park, but looked attrocious in An American Werewolf In Paris, there are just some things that the technology does not work well with. Here is another place it does not work well and you feel as if you are watching someone play a video game rather than watching a movie half the time as a result of it. When these scenes are what the entire movie is hinged upon it is not a huge leap of the imagination to see tat the rest of the movie is going to fall flat as well.

I have to say too that there is not one moment in this movie where you look and think, "wow! I never saw that coming!". In fact, you'll probably sit through the movie with a distinct sense of deja vu because it literally rips ideas from other movies left, right and centre and does so mercilessly. It also rips idea from BAD movies rather than good ones half the time, taking an already tired derivative bunch of plot lines and hackneyed dialogue and meshing it all loosely together to fill in the spaces between racing scenes. There is little, no, there is ZERO character development here, just a flat bunch of sterotypes who look rather good going through the motions of a tame, unoriginal script. Our beloved director obviously didn't feel the need to do anything but show us the racing and the rest is superfluous. We do get a silly little subplot where both main guys fight over the same girl and another involving Stallone's ex-wife which seems to have nothing to do with anything and literally goes absolutely nowhere, like they forgot about it or something. Oh, and Burt Reynolds in a wheelchair shouting at people with a plastic face...the hows and whys of why he is in that chair are never explained...

I fail to see who this movie is going to appeal to but I suppose it has its niche somewhere. Its certainly NOT going to appeal to racing fans if some friends of mine are to go by, they were disgusted at the number of inaccuracies and how blatantly unrealistic it all is, and the general action fan will find little of appeal because the action looks so...unreal! I lost count of the number of times we saw an airplane take off to show they were changing location, the city skyline to show they had got there, visors being lowered, suits being zipped up engine being revved...arrgghh! Its rubbish, it has no appeal at all, its the worst movie Stallone has ever done and thats saying something and hopefully it'll bomb when it hits our cinemas...

But hey, its your money!