Awfully Good Movies: Driven (Video)

April 14th 2017, 10:12am

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Driven (2001)
Director: Renny Harlin
Stars: Sylvester Stallone, Burt Reynolds, Kip Pardue

Vin Diesel and his “family” are headed back on the roads this weekend in THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS, so Awfully Good Movies is taking you back to the year of the first FAST AND THE FURIOUS movie and revisiting the other racing flick from 2001: DRIVEN, starring Sylvester Stallone and Burt Reynolds! Yes, somewhere in an alternate universe, THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS was the motorcar movie that tanked at the box office that year, while DRIVEN was the one that would make millions of dollars, get seven increasingly ridiculous sequels, and have its own ride at Universal Studios. But alas, Renny Harlin’s auto racing melodrama was the one that ended up tanking into obscurity, and once again endangered the career of its star and screenwriter Sylvester Stallone. But when Stallone basically takes his winning ROCKY formula and tries to insert it into the world of NASCAR, what did he think was gonna happen? Between the soapy script, the abysmal CGI effects, and the seizure-inducing editing, there’s plenty of reasons this movie led to Stallone floundering in the world of direct-to-video schlock the next couple of years before he brought Rocky and Rambo back. Now if only Stallone had rewritten this script to have him drive Paulie’s robot from ROCKY IV after the robot turns out to be a Transformer…OH-HO-HOH, now that would’ve been a billion dollar blockbuster right there.