I've been recently drawn into reading Videogum's Hunt For The Worst Movie Of All Time, where every Monday one of the chief bloggers choses a movie and rips it apart. It's throughly entertaining BUT....BUT when you read one of the aforementioned it makes you want to see the film all over again just to see what he was on about. So far I have inexplicably subjected myself to Pay It Forward (awful Hallmark-esque lump of film), Bicentennial Man (Person fucking a robot who is Robin Williams, wtf?), Ultraviolet (a MTV-ish movie straight out of the mind of a sugar addicted 7 year old boy complete with PVC outfits), Crash (how that film won Oscars I will never know) and some others that are too numerous to mention.
Sure there are some i don't agree with. I for one quite enjoyed Mr Brooks and Dan In Real Life was a couple of hours well spent. But the majority are indeed shit. But one film in particular stood out as it stars one of my favourite actors. When it came to his first scene in the film my heart sank. The perfectly reasonable question of 'What the fuck are you doing in this steaming pile of guff?' sprang into my mind. What he was doing in that shit i will never know but i feel i need to talk about it just to relax myself.
Driven (Aha see the title, I surprise myself sometimes you know) is that very film. I didn't have high hopes as i sat down to waste a couple of hours of my life. The review on Videogum had prepared me for something very long and very bizarre and i wasn't disappointed in the slightest. Ugh but it's a film with cars in and you're a girl I can here you utter in the back. But i like boy films. My top five films all have guns, death and cool action scenes in them. I am no normal chick-flick loving female. I want stunts, action, Bruce Willis sweating in a white vest, cars and copious amounts of swearing.
Driven involves cars if you hadn't already gathered. The plot was.......erm.... something about Burt Reyonlds (Yeah Burt bloody Reynolds... that should have set alarm bells straight away really) who, as Videogum pointed out, was for some unexplained reason in a wheelchair, wanted to help some awesome driver guy who wasn't that good anymore. Apparently Sylvester Stallone was the man to help (You must be really fucked if you need his help) but he was busy or retired or something. But as usual he is coaxed and this poor driver starts winning. But then there is some rivalry between him and this other driver guy who has a girl's name and looks like he has been chisselled out of granite. Then the granite guy's girlfriend is stolen by the driver who has got his mojo back and that intensifies their rivalry (apparently). Then there is the obligatory 'one last shot at winning' and obviously our hero (the mojo guy) wins in dramatic fashion.
It sounds crap doesn't it? And it you would be right to say that. You know a film has little chance when Stallone and Reynolds are its two heavy hitters. Stallone has the charisma and acting ability of a breezeblock and Reynold's face has been pulled back into another dimension so it is impossible to see what his face is meant to convey. Then there are the two main drivers who are a couple of blonde twenty-something nonentities that probably haven't worked since this film due to the sheer awfulness of their acting. Granite Face Man offends the worst with his completely emotionless (i.e. granite) face. Ever try to watch a bollard act?? Well watch this guy and then you will know what it feels like. Mojo Driver man isn't much better. He just tends to flop his hair around and gawp with his mouth open a lot. If that was acting then I could have been famous years ago.
Another thing about this film that depressed me even more was a fact that alluded to previously. Robert Sean Leonard was in it and I love him. He was in Dead Poet's Society (A guilty pleasure of mine I shamefully admit to). He was in Much Ado About Nothing which is by far my favourite Shakespeare adaptation. He was also in Tape which I love but nobody else seems to have seen (brilliant film it is by the way). Just the sheer depressing thought that he actually agreed to do this film made the experience all the more horrible. There is nothing worse then watching one of your favourite actors in a really really shit film. You feel almost embarrassed for them. The thing is he wasn't even bad is this film. In his own part he was really good, it was just everything else around him. Oh the pain.
Moral of this story is..... Unless you're both blind and deaf or in a coma DO NOT watch this film. It's shite. I will go to my grave/urn knowning that I spent two hours of my life watching this and that saddens me.
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