Harry here.... I'm going to take a couple of days with my DRIVEN review, because I need to simmer down before raging against it. The film is a Cliff Note Version of the HOW TO NOT MAKE A MOVIE book by Anonymous.... Visually, performance wise, dialogue, music, visual effects.... all hindering, not helping the story... Only go if you have a rich epileptic relative you want to force to swallow his/her own tongue... Till I feel like spending the time ripping it apart... here's Max....
Dearest Harry et al: Alexandra DuPont here.
Following his recent "Spidey" set scoop, my little brother (and "young alley-lurker," as I believe Hercules called him) Maximillian appears to have caught the AICN bug. He has not, sadly, caught the bug for proper grammar and punctuation.
And so it is with some trepidation that I submit Max's first actual movie review to Ain't It Cool -- of the Formula I F/X porn film Driven -- following a grammar scrub and mild tongue-lashing by yours truly.
To my surprise, a familial writing style emerged -- after I removed most of the labored metaphors, passive-voice constructions, overlooked compound adjectives, fruitily placed commas, and annoyingly interchangeable restrictive and nonrestrictive relative pronouns. Post it if you feel like it. Warmest, A.DuP.
*****
Fast cars. Fast women. Manly men. Stunning babes. Exciting races.
Driven has none of these elements.
What Driven does have is sociocultural significance. The film represents a major but also deadly change in the way movies are made and presented. We saw hints of this change in The Mummy from a couple of years ago, but it has reached fruition with this film. Special effects are imposed on Driven like oil on a paint-by-numbers canvas. The special effects always advertise their presence. But then, these days, all films are animated movies. Actors are no longer cattle, in the Hitchcock sense; they're cartoons. And worse, Driven may also represent the final nail in the coffin of director-driven cinema.
Driven is produced by Elie Samaha, the Italian-born Lebanese arriviste and former Studio 54 bouncer, nightclub operator, dry-cleaner-chain mogul, and L.A. real estate speculator, who runs Franchise Films. Among Franchise's most recent releases have been 3000 Miles to Graceland, The Art of War, Battlefield Earth, The Big Kahuna, Get Carter, Jill the Ripper, and The Whole Nine Yards. From this list, you can see that Franchise specializes in taking gossip-tainted action actors who are way past their sell-by date and embedding them in new templates based on the look and lure of music videos.
Samaha is the true auteur of his films. All his movies look the same (and frequently use the same cinematographer, Mauro Fiore). They also all have the same, almost elliptical, editing style that looks like the editor is trying to cover up lapses in continuity (off-screen actors are often heard speaking while someone or something else is shown). Samaha's movies tend to move fast and have simple-minded plots; he's dumber than Bruckheimer. In Driven, he has even reduced the normally visually distinctive Renny Harlan to the same Samahanian style of a weirdly edited, super-fast, narratively deficient surface texture. There's a sheen to it, but it's Pledge without the delightful scent.
Driven is about Joe Tanto (a wrinkly Sylvester Stallone), a race-car driver hauled out of retirement by Carl Henry (Burt Reynolds, whose makeup artist was no doubt a mortician). Henry is having trouble with his star driver (Kip Pardue); Joe's mandate is to help the Pardue character mature into a great driver. Other square-jawed, brawny, carefully photographed he-men on the premises are Til Schweiger, Robert Sean Leonard, and Cristin de la Fuente. This is less a movie a than a moving issue of Mandate.
(By the way, Reynolds's doing the whole film from a wheelchair will do nothing but inflame the health fears the gossip tabs constantly associate with him.)
The script is credited to Stallone. It is an anthology of all the other race-car movies you've seen: There's the young chick torn between two drivers, whose performances are serially and predictably affected by the tension; there's the well-timed car crash that takes out a competitor (whom we knew was doomed from the moment he shows up). But Stallone also seems to be trying to keep playing Rocky. His Joe is a put-upon, underappreciated lovable lout whom everyone seems to abuse freely. His ex-wife (Gina Gerson) tongue-lashes him every chance she gets. In fact, the movie alternatives between confrontational conversations and incomprehensible car races (including one improbable chase -- in Formula racers, mind you -- through the streets of Chicago).
These blizzards of invective have no motivation. It's as if explaining took too much away from the cars; as if people having quiet moments (in which they talk about themselves and set up a payoff later on in the script) would inspire too much impatience in the viewer. There is no narrative progression -- just a series of hostile conversations among a large group of unlikable people. The film's interest in the female characters is nill; the torn-between-two-lovers girl offers the film no dramatic tension; and a virtually undefined female reporter who takes an interest in Joe fades from the film rather rapidly, her tissue-thin use -- to affirm the heterosexuality of the star -- having been used up.
But the real importance of Driven is as a mainstream non-FX genre movie that nevertheless exploits special effects to cartoonize the images. Bits of car fly into the air, and the camera follows them in a fantastical, impossible manner that the viewer knows is fake. A manhole cover flies past Joe's head. Joe has a trick of scooping up coins with his hot tires, and we see this in impossibly microscopic closeness. Viewers may love The Mummy, but they have to admit that there were whole sequences in it -- the ones with sandstorms, chariots, and ghostly presences -- in which nothing was "real" in the conventional movie sense of the word. But at least that movie was suppose to be a comic, Indiana-Jones-style adventure. Driven is an adult drama that infantilizes itself and its viewers via its byways into cartoony excess. The sudden cartooniness takes you out of the drama -- because, unexpectedly, a part of the film looks different from the rest. If the F/X had been better, perhaps there would have been no problem. But F/X creators are incapable of creating special effects that blend invisibly into the film, otherwise how would anyone know that they'd done some special effects? Effects artists always leave their work just a tad bit shitty to make sure everyone notices.
Like Top Gun, Driven is a film that refuses to be explicit about what its real subject, target audience, and cinematic goals. Among other things, its aim is to destroy the cinema as we know it. We, as citizens of CinemaWorld, need to put the brakes on movies such as Driven as soon as possible.
Maximillian Q.V. DuPont
