Jim Hoffman is a family man and cocky arse whose greed has him punching just above his pay grade. One day this gets him into trouble – the plane he’s just used to pilot his family to Disney World is stuffed full of cocaine, and Jim (Jason Sudeikis) is busted as his wife (Judy Greer) and kids look on. But the FBI handler (Corey Stoll) gives him an out: if he’s willing to go undercover and help take down bigger fish than himself, he can avoid prison and maybe even keep his family in the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed.

He accepts and they get relocated, which means there’s almost a full minute before Jim is plotting again. Turns out, his new neighbour is none other than John DeLorean (Lee Pace) and Jim sees nothing but opportunity. Which is too bad because you get the sense that there may have been genuine friendship here if Jim wasn’t such a selfish ahole. So just as John is designing and funding and marketing the famous gull-winged “car of the future” that would bear his name, Jim was plotting to entrap him. With friends like these, you don’t need enemies.

Lee Pace is wonderful of course. Even playing a quiet character, your eye naturally gravitates to him as he steals every scene. DeLorean could turn it on when he needed to, and that charisma bleeds through Lee’s performance – it’s only thanks to Sudeikis’ presence that I remember this isn’t a documentary.

Nick Hamm’s Driven is about idealism and capitalism and what explosive, misinformed things can happen when the two are combined. It also makes you think about the nature of good and evil, and who the true heroes and villains of this (true) story are, if indeed there are any of either. But most of all it makes you think of what this movie would be like if it was better. Acting aside, this movie is just kind of meh. It describes itself as an ‘intense thriller’ but that’s a pile of baloney. It’s funny, if anything, but not quite a comedy. It’s not consistently anything. It suffers from a lack of identity. Possibly it only skates by because the story is interesting, but long enough ago that we’ve forgotten it, with an iconic piece of pop culture at its centre to orient us. For Lee Pace alone, Driven is worth checking out eventually, but this is one you can afford to skip at the theatre.