Driven Crazy

Ok, Ok… here’s the pitch. You’ve got this kinda mush-mouthed, body-builder guy who is a washed-up racecar driver, see? We’ll get a big name to play him like Sly Stallone – movie sells itself at this point, right? And his former owner – let’s say he’s wheelchair-bound like Frank Williams, only with a really horrible facelift – anyways, the owner calls him out of retirement to teach this young kid how to hum in his helmet in order to win races. You with me so far, chief? Now the kid’s nemesis – let’s call him Dieter – is a handsome but totally uncompelling, teutonic automaton… kind of a miniature racing version of Arnold Schwarzenegger, only we can’t afford him so we’ll hire some guy who looks the part and we’ll teach him how to act along the way. Now here’s where it gets good… these guys race for what we’ll call the “World Championship,” only it won’t be Formula One, because those guys wouldn’t really give us the time of day. Instead, we got approval from these other guys called CART to do whatever we want at all their races and yet we don’t have to mention their names once in the movie! Isn’t that great?! So anyways, we take Stallone and a bunch of good looking, talentless kids, we string together some really loud techno music (the kids love this stuff), with a lot of video-game-like animation and just a skosh of real racing footage and BAAAM! We’re talking box office baby! Big Box office. What’s that? The script? Who needs a script when you got Stallone! Besides, there’s no budget for a script. No, we solved that problem by getting Sly to write the script. Come on, how hard can it be??

Sound hard to believe? Does to me too. And yet a lot of high paid knowledgeable people had to buy into this “concept” to turn it into the stomach-turner they call “Driven.” In case you couldn’t tell by now, I hated the movie. HATED IT. And yet I wanted so badly to like it. After all, it’s only once every 10-15 years that someone works up the funding and the cojones to make a racing film. These usually fall into one of two categories: those true to the sport that are box office disasters (i.e., “Grand Prix” and “Le Mans”); or those that do reasonably well at the box office but portray a shallow, myopic view of the world of racing (i.e., insert any other racing movie except “Grand Prix” and “Le Mans” here).