Driven (2018)

Director: Nick Hamm

Cast: Jason Sudeikis, Lee Pace, Judy Greer, Michael Cudlitz

Have I Seen it Before: Never. In one of my Apple TV movie buying sprees, this one came across my radar, and I was probably more than a little helpless against its pitch.

Did I Like It: This is easily one of the top 4 films ever releaased that relied upon the Delorean Motor Car for a vital part of its plot.

Har. Har. Har.

It’s a reasonably entertaining deep dive into a story that—over forty years later—is even a bit of a one-line footnote in the making of time machines of note, but it isn’t reaching for much more than that. Sudekis is playing a slightly scuzzier version of his Ted Lasso personae, and Lee Pace is more than a little bit playing his character from Halt and Catch Fire, except with a grey wig. It’s a semi-amusing little trifle that you enjoy while wtching, but have no trouble understanding why it has become mostly forgotten in the years since.

I’m a little surprised that a film so dependent on the car with the gull-wing door, we never see one throughout the vast majority of of the runtime. Even John Delorean (Pace) himself is never seen driving one, as if he knew something we all expected way back when. Only at the end do we see someone—Sudekis, in one of the film’s less likely pontifications on what we know about the DeLorean sting operation—behind the wheel of the DMC-12, and even then it is played for something of joke, driving home the point that the car never really worked that well. Had this film somehow come before those other films that made the car famous, Zemeckis and Co. might have opted for some other totem for their time travel.

Come to think of it, the fact that this, a Universal production, managed to avoid any references to those other films is something of a marvel of restraint.

And now that I’ve gone this whole review without bringing it up, all I want to do is watch those three.

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Director: James Gunn

Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Lee Pace

Have I Seen it Before: I’m not sure what insisted that I make it for the opening weekend of a movie featuring characters I had no prior awareness, but we all made it, and now Star-Lord and company are all a part of us… And many of us were not opposed to the idea of a (new) Howard the Duck movie as we thought we might have been beforehand.

The state of the Marvel Cinematic Universe was probably more precarious in 2014 than Disney and Company. The movies had yet to flounder at the box office, and The Avengers (2012) was one of the big box-office money makers of all time. But, as could clearly be seen now through the lens of hindsight, the characters we had all come to love (or, more accurately, the actors playing them) might not be cost effective for the bean counters anymore.

And so, Marvel would have to start dipping deeper into the catalog. It was a gamble on Marvel’s part, but they could afford to gamble a bit at this point in their output. But they did it in a smart way. They did it just a little bit, and they made sure the movie they branched out in was actually pretty good. And they managed to stumble upon the reality that Chris Pratt was a verifiable movie star*.

And so the movie plays out like an approximation of what it would be like if Quentin Tarantino made a high-action space opera**. Gunn may not quite be the mast craftsman that Tarantino is, but the dish is made with the right ingredients, and presents a pretty enjoyable feast, all things considered.

On one directly critical note: is it weird that I think the biggest suspension of disbelief in this movie is that I’m supposed to somehow believe that a cassette mix tape has crystal-clear audio quality nearly thirty years after it was originally mixed? When played through a walkman that was just as old? That the tape ever played that well? In a movie filled with hollowed-out god heads, tree men, and the blind faith that a superhero movie with no known superheroes could ever hope to be any kind of hit, the music presentation probably shouldn’t bother me, and yet, there are moments when I can’t quite push it out of my mind.

*Although I’ll admit that I might be wrong in this assessment. The end titles call the shot that the Guardians will return. I mean, I suppose they might have been able to guess that even if the movie underperformed, they would play a vital role in the quickly forming Infinity Saga but man… Especially in a movie with the aforementioned Howard, they should have allowed for the possibility that this might not work out quite as well as they might have hoped.

**Which—to be fair—he still may do.