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I love to drive. I find driving a car to be one of the most relaxing things in the world (depending on the traffic). So being without a car for the past few months in college, I hoped to have lived the experience of being behind a wheel vicariously through Sylvester Stallone’s racing flick Driven. Unfortunately, the driving depicted in this film is as about as realistic as the fighting in The Matrix.

With Fast Five (why can’t Hollywood continue their Ke$ha-fication of movie titles like Scre4m and simply title it Fa5t?) being released this weekend, Driven was the perfect film to reflect back upon, being released exactly ten years ago from this weekend. As a big fan of The Fast & the Furious series (even though it might be the laziest titled franchise ever), I was hoping Driven would be just as much fun with Stallone co-writing/starring and Renny Harlin directing. Well, hopes and actuality are two very different things.

NASCAR is one of the biggest American sports today, so how come Hollywood can’t make a decent racing movie to tap into that market? Well, based off of Driven, here is a checklist why.

Reason number one: Hollywood doesn’t know how to portray realistic driving. Sure, I can accept the fact that only in the movies can race car drivers flip through the air ten times and land on the ground safely at 100 miles per hour, but Driven’s driving is so off the charts (particularly a race scene through the streets of Chicago) that I am not sure if I should be amazed or laughing. The latter is what I ended up doing nine times out of ten.

Reason number two: Hollywood doesn’t realize that race car drivers have emotions. Stallone either frowns or smiles. Burt Reynolds (looking like a wax statue of himself) either cackles menacingly or sneers menacingly. Kip Pardue, who plays a racing prodigy under Stallone’s eye, either cheers with a trophy in his hand or looks frustrated at the paparazzi. And then the only way to tell Estella Warren’s emotion, the love interest, is by the various states of undress she is in (if that is an emotion). You see stone-hard serial killers with more facial expressions than these guys.

Reason number three: Hollywood doesn’t realize that cars do not need to be CGI. While I’m sure in 2001 the graphics were impressive, some of the race shots look like Hot Wheel replicas with the camera lens smeared in Vaseline – certainly not being with us today. I never understood the necessity of directors needing to CGI racecars instead of doing practical stunts, but I guess in Driven’s case, the CGI is needed since it would be physically impossible to do half of the tricks showcased.

Reason number four: Hollywood doesn’t realize that cars going around in a circle is not a plot. Case in point? If I tried to describe what Driven is about right now, I would have given the movie more thought than the screenwriters did.

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