Driven (2001)

Well I didn't hate this which I expected to after reading multiple scathing reviews. I didn't watch it for the racing aspect though so I didn't have any problems with the "physics" of the driving as others seemed to, that was just noise to me. I viewed this strictly on an entertainment level where it worked just fine, even if the love-triangle/romance aspect did wear a bit thin.The actual race scenes have been filmed in a way that reminded me of 'Any Given Sunday', sort of ADD, flipping back and worth between shots of feet changing gears on pedals, hands on steering wheel, speedometer, giant drops of rain blurring vision, crowd shots, hot babes, the pit crew, the boss crew. Its colourful, frenetic, filled with obligatory crashes and pure entertainment.SS wrote the screenplay and takes a supporting role here as Joe Tanto a washed up former driver who is called back by race team owner Burt Reynolds to coach his current boy wonder Jimmy Bly (Kip Pardue) to the world championship.Bly is slipping in the rankings, cracking under pressure from his ambitious promoter brother and it doesn't help that he's also pursuing an affair with Sophia, the girlfriend of his nemesis, top racer Beau Brandenburg.The story for the most part focuses on relationships in the backdrop of Indy car racing. I found the characters all to be multifaceted and we witness them dealing with their individual struggles. Sly plays a sad-sack sort of guy who everyone picks on and I was very impressed with Gina Gershon as his ex-wife, beautiful but what a b!tch. Burt Reynolds face -wow his plastic surgeon was heavy handed with the scalpel, it's pulled so tight it looks freaky. He does a good job with his character though. 1/26/16

I'm DRIVEN to love this! There is simply so much to love about this movie. I've been waiting to see this for so many years, I can't express how happy I am to finally see it. An intelligent script, with direction that does it justice. Even all the side characters are brilliantly played. This movie never grabbed the public's attention the way it should have. It's a film that reeks of its time and place. The first 38 minutes of the running time are particularly hard to endure. . I'm not sure whether it is really a guilty pleasure or simply a film I remember as being one. So why do I like it so much? The characters are wonderful in the movie. The film unfolds in two halves. I remember watching this and being spellbound by the last third of the movie. 7/10.

i remember sly on the f1 grid getting ideas didn't get many i see plot was bad and as for the racing nothing like real racing unless your on a PlayStation so don't watch it i gave up never watched the end what a waste of my time!!!!!!!!!!!! OK so it goes like this. race car drivers at each others throats over a women sly as mentor showing the rookie how to do it real race driver names just to make it sound real over the top crash scenes that they just walk out of i know safety is good in moto sport now but come on oh yes and don't forget the love triangle so all in all waste of time could have done so much better not even worth watching on a Sunday with a large hangover and i nearly forgot the awful commentating so do not watch i only gave 1 star as it has some fit women in it. !

The Wizard of Oz is more rooted in reality than this piece of garbage from the pen of Sly Stallone. At least aware that he's no longer young enough to play the male lead, he gives himself a supporting role which somehow manages to bag more screen time than the nominal leads – Til Schweiger and some other guy – who play a pair of racing drivers vying for the driving championship of one of those sports that looks suspiciously like Formula One but isn't. Stallone's character is called in as back up to the other guy's challenge. (I can't remember the guy's name, and the blandness of both his features and his performance mean I can't really be bothered to look him up). Anyway, this guy's a from-out-of-the-blue rookie who's suddenly suffering from the wobbles with the finishing line in sight. There's a few women involved, but they're just there to pad out the running time and deflect the possibility of anybody detecting a homoerotic undertone.Renny Harlin's direction is in-your-face flashy, replete with wandering shaky-cam shots, astonishing high-speed prangs that send wheels and stuff hurtling skywards, and two dozen cuts during any thirty-second conversation. He does manage to conjure up a couple of moments of tension, but the impression is that he's adopting all these razzle-dazzle techniques in a futile attempt to divert your attention from the dull plot and asinine script.Ah yes, the script… If I wrote this review with the same care and skill as Stallone wrote the screenplay for Driven, it would read something like this: The script was bad. I did not like the script. I wish the script was better because I did not like the script. It made me sad. Why do they make scripts like this? It made me sleepy. Find yourself. A talented cast would have struggled to mine anything of worth from this rubbish but this lot are hardly A-list: A German star speaking his second language, a model turned actress, the aforementioned bland guy whose name I've chosen to forget. Burt Reynolds shows his commitment to bankruptcy by playing the hard-as-nails crippled manager of the racing team from behind the plastic mask that became his face sometime in the mid-1990s – but he at least gets to sit down throughout and has at least a functional acting technique.