Driven (2001, United States)

Running time: 115 minutes

Language: English

During championship race young talented driver Jimmy Bly challanges the German Beau Brandenburg, but small error of Jimmy makes their tyres contact and Bly ends the race without points. Owner of the team, former driver Carl Henry, who is in the wheelchair, has the feeling that something had to be done and quickly. Bly has still chance for the title, but he will lose it if he will make mistakes like that. Henry phones his former driver, Joe Tanto, who retired from racing after accident that almost killed him. Tanto agrees to join the team and help the young driver to develop, but soon discovers Henry is more intereted in using him to block the cars to make it easy for Bly to score points. During his first race Henry orders Tanto to visit to pit and return to track just in time to block Brandenburg from taking the lead from Bly. The tension between Brandenburg and Bly reaches new level when Brandenburg’s girlfriend leaves him and date Bly.

Movie that shows that gives the chance to take a look behind the closed doors of racing teams - how the drivers interact with each others, with managers, their loved ones, the press. Sylvester Stallone spent a lot of time around Formula One races preparing for that production and it show - most of the characters seems to be based on well known figures from Formula One world. Carl Henry is tough on his drivers and is in the wheelchair - just like Frank Williams. Beau Brandenburg is strictly professional, not really liked among other drivers - just like Michael Schumacher was in year 2000. The story of one driver stealing wife of another driver seems suspiciously similiar to what happened to Heinz-Harald Frentzen and Michael Schumacher.

What is more the story is very similiar in concept to classic Grand Prix, where reporter enters the world of racing teams and veteran driver has to explain her all the weird thing about it. The CGI used heavily in Driven were impressive, but often the special effects went too far and instead of racing scenes we have science fiction with car flying in the air in slow motion. Overall huge disappointment - it could have been a good movie, but as usual Hollywood tries to make interesting thing even more interesting and goes too far.

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