According to Sylvester Stallone, getting his racing movie made was “a struggle.” He wrote, “People kept telling me it couldn’t be done, and I had to shop it around Hollywood for four years.” But the veteran star persisted, and eventually Warner Bros. agreed to distribute while Stallone reunited with his “Cliffhanger” director Renny Harlin. That was a good move considering their previous collaboration rescued Stallone from a career nadir and helped him regain relevance in the early ’90s. At the turn of the century, Stallone was once again experiencing a bit of a lull, and was even considering playing Batman opposite Mark Hamill in a fan film. Surely, then, his sports drama designed to drill into the human element of racing was, much like “Rocky” and its similar approach to sport, destined to succeed … right?

Well, it didn’t succeed. Released on April 27, 2001, “Driven” made just $54.6 million on a $72 million budget and was savaged by critics who lambasted the character development, plot, and CGI. This was far from Stallone’s first failure, of course, but considering the man basically forged a whole career off the back of writing one script, it’s always interesting to delve into why a Stallone-penned movie fails. If his attempt to get “inside the helmets” of these racers didn’t entice audiences, the real-life race footage didn’t prove much more effective in that regard. Apparently, Harlin originally produced a four-hour cut of the movie, which was, of course, stripped right the way down for the theatrical version. That can’t be the only issue that contributed to the film’s failure, however, as Warner Bros. later screened a four-hour cut of “The Batman” which turned out fine when it was streamlined for audiences.

Whatever the case, critics weren’t very nice to Stallone’s movie. “Driven” has a 14% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 111 reviews. Roger Ebert surmised that Stallone had made “a movie by, for, and about the Attention Deficit Disordered,” while Michael O’Sullivan of the Washington Post was even more scathing, describing the film as “a music video shot by a ‘Cops’ camera crew on crystal meth.” It’s not surprising, then, that during a Q&A five years after the movie debuted, Stallone was asked about projects he wished he didn’t make, and listed “Driven” alongside “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot” and several other duds. Reynolds, meanwhile, seemed to prefer not talking about the film at all, and you can’t really blame him.