DRIVEN

About what you’d expect. Sylvester Stallone plays a washed-up has-been — in this case, Indy-type-racecar driver Joe Tanto, who’s brought back mid season to mentor a talented young thing who’s stumbling. Protégé Jimmy Bly (Kip Pardue) is the Kurt Cobain of racing: alternative, angstful, and something of a wimp. After a come-from-nowhere start to the season, he keeps losing his cool and hence his races to the same Germanic guy (Til Schweiger) who stole his girl. All this might cause him to mope around if he hadn’t been moping so much to start with.

Will Jimmy take the championship? Or will his arch-nemesis triumph? Will manager Carl Henry (Burt Reynolds, and useless) drop Jimmy? — and thus Joe? Will Jimmy’s own brother sell him out? Will these people ever stop loudly psychoanalyzing each other? It’s hard to say. Against a backdrop of weirdly impersonal crowd sequences (director Renny Harlin doesn’t even seem to enjoy the miles of half-naked women) and Stallone-scripted, half-baked subplots, our cardboard characters spend most of their time impersonating the racecars — impressive pieces of machinery that rarely connect. When they do, the resulting crashes are lovingly rendered but lifeless and a bit mystifying. It all seems like one big commercial, but for what?

— Kristen Marcum