The John DeLorean story looks great on paper. It’s a story of hubris and the limitations of capitalism. DeLorean was a massively successful engineer and executive who came to realize how impossible it is to succeed at the highest level, no matter how skilled or smart you think you are. His product, while deeply flawed, was iconic, in no small part thanks to Back to the Future. I even remember having a hot wheels DeLorean as a kid and thinking this thing looked so cool. Then of course there’s his decadent lifestyle and the salacious cocaine scandal that took him down. This is a man made for a good biography to be written or at least good for killing an hour on a Wikipedia dive.
I just think his story isn’t that cinematic. Because of the elements above, it feels like it should be, but it’s not. Essentially, he’s a great engineer and a mediocre businessman. He tried to build a product and made concessions until the product was no longer any good. He went deeply in debt and did something illegal to try and get out of it. No one died. There were no chases. The sting by the FBI went off without a hitch. It’s an interesting story to hear but not to watch.
Driven attempts to find a more interesting angle. It takes a comedic perspective with someone tangentially related to DeLorean and fabricates some of the story around him. Jason Sudeikis excels as this kind of lovable huckster: a guy who carries himself like a better conman and liar than he actually is. Casting Lee Pace as John DeLorean works is some ways. He certainly captures the mysteriousness of him and that feeling like he always has the upper hand, even when he clearly doesn’t. Pace just isn’t great at playing someone believably popular. He always seems like he’s full of shit. His take on DeLorean is more “guy you invite to all the parties because you never know what he’ll bring” than “guy who throws the party everyone wants to go to” if that makes any sense. I do enjoy Judy Greer and Corey Stoll rebelling against the movie with their performances. Greer has a wet blank wife role but occasionally says “I know what my character is supposed to say here, but instead, I’m going to have some fun*”. Stoll on the other hand is the only guy who realizes he’s in a serious crime movie. That’s different than him being the only person who doesn’t realize he’s in a comedy. That implies that Stoll is playing the role incorrectly. Instead, he’s very intentionally playing this as someone annoyed by everyone else, namely Sudeikis, treating this all like a joke.
*To be clear, I assume that’s how the character was written, Greer just infuses it with more conviction than I expected.
Overall, the movie has trouble figuring out how much of a comedy or drama it is and ends up falling short on both. The 80s of it all felt pretty superficial. Not lived-in. Much more “how we remember the 80s” than “how it actually was”. Not all of the performances worked for me and the ones that did worked because they were trying to be in a different movie.
Verdict: Weakly Don’t Recommend
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