Throughout the latter half of the 1990’s, there had been lots of talk about a Formula 1 based film being made. This raised a number of eyebrows at the time, for it is well known that movies about sports tend to lack, well… everything.Eventually word began to spill out that it was a Sylvester Stallone project and that Burt Reynolds might be involved and everyone in the Formula 1 world – whether that be fans or those in the sport – breathed a sigh of relief when word came out that it was not happening. However, those that were sanctioning the mainly US-based CART series at the time were not so quick to dismiss the idea.
Try to hype up the background and you may find yourself in an empty shell wrapped up in social tinsel – I know a lot of engineers and none of them do a good Hollywood strut!! Add to that, a growing number of sportspeople tend tend to be very, very dull following years of PR training that often excises personality in favour of clean-living sobriety. To try and make all these factors “sexy” often doesn’t work and the result are a bunch of characters that would never exist in real life.
Given some of the people involved in making the movie, it’s probably no surprise that Driven is a piece of fucking shit that should never have seen the light of day. For the casual film fan, the script and production is so incredibly shoddy that it makes watching the feature a laborious effort; for enthusiasts of motor-racing, the mechanics of the machines and the director’s quests for the most overblown, obscene and frankly impossible crashes make Driven a horrific and embarrassing experience.
The film goes one further by creating some of the most dreadful special effects anyone could possibly imagine; however even that foreknowledge doesn’t prepare the viewer for the way the director randomly appears to swap from bad CGI to real footage – it is made even more apparent due to the horribly cartoonish nature of the graphics. One only needs to see the truly awful street-chase scene to get a sense of just how awful this film actually is.
In short, this film is very bad, but to witness the “highlights” of Stallone’s epic misadventure, click on the You Tube link below and enjoy the horror of bad film making. It must also be remembered that for a number of the cast, this was a career killer.
