There was a charged moment, sometime in the early years of this century, when it seemed Lee Pace could become one of America’s major screen actors. A sensitive everyman with a simultaneous, soulful outsider affinity, he made a dazzling debut as a transgender showgirl in “Soldier’s Girl,” but the slide into more workaday roles since then has been steady.
“Driven” is nothing if not workaday: A diverting, color-by-numbers comedy of mad moguls, FBI informants and not-so-fast cars in disco-to-Reagan-era California, Nick Hamm’s loosely fact-based film plays as a good-humored knockoff of Doug Liman’s “American Made” or David O. Russell’s “American Hustle,” without even those films’ Scorsesesque ambitions. Improbably enough, however, it gives Pace a role to echo his earliest, most exciting promise: As disgraced automobile tycoon John DeLorean, he precisely etches an self-unmade man of tightly pinched sorrow, hovering some way above the gaudy hijinks beneath him.
“Driven” is nothing if not workaday: A diverting, color-by-numbers comedy of mad moguls, FBI informants and not-so-fast cars in disco-to-Reagan-era California, Nick Hamm’s loosely fact-based film plays as a good-humored knockoff of Doug Liman’s “American Made” or David O. Russell’s “American Hustle,” without even those films’ Scorsesesque ambitions. Improbably enough, however, it gives Pace a role to echo his earliest, most exciting promise: As disgraced automobile tycoon John DeLorean, he precisely etches an self-unmade man of tightly pinched sorrow, hovering some way above the gaudy hijinks beneath him.
- 9/8/2018
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
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