Driven | | Cast : | Sylvester Stallone, Kip Pardue, Til Schweiger | | Director : | Renny Harlin | | Studio : | Warner Home Video | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Dolby, Widescreen | | Released Date : | April 27, 2001 | | DVD Released Date : | June 01, 2004 | | Language : | Unknown (Dubbed), English (Dubbed), English (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), English (Original Language), French (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | July 01, 2005 | | Summary | A not so sly move... | Content
 | In his recently, (and miraculously) published book entitled "Sly Moves", Sylvestor Stalone talks about what is needed to acheive one's dream, what he did to acheive his, what he eats, and how he does sit ups...everything the 9 people in this country who admire him need to know to understand what makes him tick, and how he came to be what he is.
One thing he leaves out, however, is which minor demon he sold his soul to, in order to maintain enough influence in Hollywood to continue having movies he write and stars in produced...movies, such as Driven, which include Sly's own screenplay, in which his imagination brought such lines to the screen as,
"What am I? A piece of wood?"
and...
"I was raised by frogs. Ribbit. Ribbit."
These two examples being the best lines in the entire film, I will not mention any more of them..they only get worse.
Driven is a film Sly obviously wrote a while back...called Rocky. Being the master of the cut and paste technique that is the mish mash of Hollywood tripe that some attempt to call movies, Stalline has simply transposed that story into the world of racing...at least his version of it.
The story goes he wanted to set this movie in the world of formula one racing, but the wise folks there said "no way", thereby making history as those who dodged the biggest bullet in the history of humankind.
It then became necessary for Sly to base his "rookie with a lack of confidence, until he meets the old mentor who challenges him" story on a racing world more suited with the level of reality depicted in same. The ideal choice would have been the land of Mario Kart, on the Nintendo 64. But they too said that his planned stunts and dialogue were just a bit too fanciful...so he settled on the now defunct world of CART racing.
Not that it matters, as in addition his script of any semblence of plot, dramatic tension, dialogue, symbolism, social significance, or remotley adequate editing, Stallone has also gotten rid of any need to include such concepts as gravity and the space-time continuem in his movie.
Yes, the movie is so abysmal that even the fundmental laws of nature that hold the actual universe itself together are neglected, as race cars running at two hundred miles an hour plus are lightly tipped by another car, only to instantly sail into a wall, flip over said wall, and gather enough momentum, ex nihlio to sammersalt aproximatley 1400 feet into the air, and then slow down while descending back towards the race track, where all of the rest of the cars, and the crowd continue to respond to the action in regular time as we know it in this dimension.
Moving ever downward, our driver floats ever so close to another car, (which by this time has inexplicably traveled around the track at least once while the victim was still in the air), and eventually is nudged in mid air by said car. The car on the ground continues, at normal speed to drive down the track, while our hero of this, the most assinine car related sequence ever filmed once again flies up into the air another several hundred feet, bursts into flames, soars out of the stadium, catching nearby trees on fire, before landing, face down in a nearby lake....while leaking fuel of course...leading us to theoretically fear that he will drown, or the whole lake will burst into flames, and ignite the nearby daycare center ablaze. (Only ONE of these ridiculous actions was made up by me. Watch the movie, if you dare, to find out which one.)
The resolution of this scene is even stupider than that, and this was the best part of the entire hackneyed, uninspired, bloated, pretentious and obviously supernaturally conceived drek.
Even the T&A in this film is not done correctly...as our hero speeds down the streets of Chicago in a RACE car, it blows up the skirt of an unsuspecting 20 something hottie on the street, revealing her hindquarters covered not in a firey red thong, but the largest, thickest, whitest set of granny panties the world has ever known. Only a movie connected with Sly Stallone would attempt gratutious T&A, (and I do mean gratuitous) and forget to include the "A".
Even worse is Sly's commentary track for the deleted scenes, in which he sounds convinced that he has in fact written one of the most profound and history changing screenplays since Citizen Kane...meadering endlessly on about motivations, plot devices, back story and character development that is not so much as even hinted at in the action of this so called "film".
Stallone is a pompous, self congratulatory, has-been hack of a loser who should, for the sake of our children, be granted no more studio money to fund so much as a Kleenex commericial to which his name as a screen writer or actor is attached.
The single worst film in the absurdly long and sadly ever expanding repetoire of this, America's single worst actor/producer/screenwriter, fitness guru. Someone knock this clown out, please.
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| Rating | | | Date | June 20, 2005 | | Summary | Cheesy effects and stereotypical plot | Content
| Racer takes on a rookie. Wow. We've never seen that before, have we? The worst thing about this movie are the race scenes, many of which resemble a video game. I'd rather watch ABC Sports' "To Live and Drive the Indy 500." That's more realistic AND much more fun. |
| Rating | | | Date | February 13, 2005 | | Summary | A great movie | Content
| First of all, people should understand that it's a MOVIE and the main goal of a movie is entertainment. Stop whining about this or that. It's not supposed to be exactly like in real life, when you tell a story you always embellish things to make them "bigger or better" than they actually were. Same applies here, the crashes are over the top yes, but it makes it more exiting. And it's not like there's 300 spectacular crashes in the movie, there's 3 major crashes, so don't push it.
The true essence of the movie is relationship between people and the racing stuff is the theater of it.
I really enjoy this movie, I've seen it a dozen times and it doesn't have the pretention to revolutionnize the film industry, but it's certainly a very good entertainment. The actors are all great. Plus the DVD is packed with a lot of extras, Renny Harlin audio commentary, two featurettes and over 50 minutes of deleted and/or longer scenes with Stallone commentary for each of these scenes. For all the Driven haters: maybe you should listen to those extras to understand this movie better. |
| Rating | | | Date | November 04, 2004 | | Summary | Absolutely horrible | Content
| I was afraid even before watching this movie that the degree of realism was going to be on a par with Days of Thunder (cars slamming into each other constantly, wrecked cars winning races, etc) and it only took a few minutes of viewing for me to realize this movie was far, FAR worse. Aside from the fact that none of the actors could perform their way out of old paper bags, the movie moves at such a rapid pace that it almost makes you dizzy.
And now for the degree of realism. I understand that not all car races are electrifying, but I see no reason for there to be a spectacular crash every single race. And I have never in 18 years of watching IndyCar races seen a car go flying off the track and into a water hazard. THAT'S WHY THE BARRIERS ARE THERE. Also, those IndyCars are aerodynamically designed so that if the track turned upside-down, the cars would stay glued to the course, yet they fly off the ground in this movie like they were made out of tissue paper. And good lord, the joyride through Chicago was THE stupidest scene in the whole movie. It would be an interesting scene aside from the fact that INDYCARS CAN'T START BY THEMSELVES. And even worse, neither one of the drivers even gets in trouble about it......don't get it. This movie makes Days of Thunder look like a masterpiece of cinema. If you want to watch a racing movie, rent that. Not Driven. ABSOLUTELY NOT DRIVEN. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 29, 2004 | | Summary | Terrible, fake, sleazy, cheap disappointment | Content
| I must admit that when I heard this movie was in the works, I was giddy with excitment. When I heard that Stallone was writing it, I became a little less excited, but still optimistic. Being a huge CART fan, this was going to be the movie that helped define the league.
How unfortunate that this movie turned out to be a steaming pile of cow manure! The 'plot' is ridiculous. The 'action' is not even remotely close to real life. The 'special effects' look worse than most 1980's video games. I've never seen a movie with more potential go so horribly wrong. It's too bad that CART ended up going bankrupt after this movie. Who knows, maybe if the movie was halfway respectable, it could have helped CART's financial woes? If you are a racing fan, I would advise that you watch this movie, only so that you know how laughable it is. Also, you will then know how NOT to make a movie. |
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