TORONTO – Where do we even start with “Driven?” After an hour and 53 minutes, I’m not sure what Nick Hamm’s latest directorial effort wants to be. Is it supposed to be funny? Is it supposed to be poignant? Can it even find a tone that is compelling to watch? If the answer to all those questions is “I have no idea” than your movie probably has some serious problems.
“Driven” is an embellished account of how “Jim” (Jason Sudeikis, disappointing), an FBI informant (or a composite of one), randomly waltzed into the life of famed automaker John DeLorean (Lee Pace, doing his best) just as the famed automaker was attempting to launch his new automobile company in 1977. After being caught transporting cocaine from Belize to the U.S., Jim had made a deal with the government to inform on Morgan Hetrick (Michael Cudlitz, a bit too loud) who had 14 to 16 planes trafficking drugs across the border. The problem was that over 18 months Jim found it impossible to entangle Morgan into anything the FBI could use, constantly infuriating the special agent in charge of his case (Corey Stoll, wasted).
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Living with his wife Ellen (Judy Greer, singlehandedly trying to save the movie) and their two teenage kids in a Southern California neighborhood, Jim is shocked to find out that the designer of his vintage Pontiac GTO was living across the street. As time passes the incredibly goofy Jim and the clearly smarter than everyone else in the room Ellen become friends with the seemingly cooler than cool DeLorean and his wife Christina (Isabel Arraiza, thankless role). As history notes, DeLorean could not raise the money he truly needed to build his dream car and made concessions that truly diminished its value. Ellen realizes that their neighbor is pulling off some sort of con, but it’s only when DeLorean gets desperate to save his company that Jim realizes he has something tangible to finally get the FBI off his back.
Jim convinces DeLorean to put up $2 million of a $30 million cocaine haul that Morgan will transport into the states. Once the cocaine is sold, DeLorean will have the money he needs to keep his auto factory going and Morgan will be an investor, having laundered his money into the company. The film’s central conflict boils down to whether DeLorean will go through with it and whether the conman with a heart (um, that’s Jim) can truly betray his “friend.” By this point in the film, however, we simply don’t care what occurs.
As alluded to earlier, Hamm’s big mistake is his tone. By trying to sell this story as a “can you believe it’s true?” pseudo-comedy with dramatic elements randomly thrown in here and there it feels completely toothless. Yeah, we can believe it and, no, it’s not funny. There never seem to be any real stakes and DeLorean is given such an unsympathetic portrayal you simply can’t understand why Jim would be so enamored with him in the first place. Frankly, it’s also never clear why the FBI is paying Jim and his family enough to live in such a nice home for months on end when they have effectively received nothing on their investment for over a year. (Did Jim provide them other intel? Did he work on other cases? Who knows!). What happened to DeLorean and Morgan is real, but the rest of Colin Bateman‘s screenplay simply strains credibility.
Hamm also clearly wanted to try and give this movie some scope and make it look like a studio production. Shooting in Puerto Rico was a gamble that simply didn’t work out. The film never looks like it’s taking place in Southern California (who knew Orange County was so tropical?) and the other locations look more like 1968 than 1977 or 1981. Because the production doesn’t have the resources to truly dress the set as they need to, the film often looks out of place which is increasingly distracting.
Someday there might be an entertaining and insightful movie about the life of Jon DeLorean. Or, moreover, DeLorean’s venture to try to take on his former employers, the big Detroit automakers. That’s a story worth telling. “Driven,” as currently constituted, is not. [C-]
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