Driven to Murder, a.k.a. Driven (Automatic Media, Halcyon International, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Alas, the second film on Lifetime’s Saturday schedule – credited on LIfetime’s Web page as Driven to Murder but listed on imdb.com as just Driven, with Driven to Murder as the original working title – was nowhere near as good because it totally lacks the moral complexity of The Walls Are Watching. We first see the villain of the piece, Jason (Adam Blake), who gets a lot of crotch shots from writer-director Collin Everett because one of the Lifetime rules is that any genuinely hot, sexy guy is going to turn out to be no damned good, murder a “UR” ride-share driver (who’s rather sexy himself in a nerdish way and it’s a pity we lose him so soon)_ and steals the man’s vehicle so he can pick up another ride-share customer and torture her. The other ride-share customer is Sarah (Lucia Guerrero), who’s just returning home from a night on the town with her friend Gayle (Jessica Buda) and has called UR to get a car to take her home. On the way Jason insists on driving through a bad part of town (this is L.A.) where homeless people congregate, and he runs one down and kills him, then keeps driving Sarah and insists that she can’t go to the police because they’re in this together and the police will arrest her if she reports them.

Later Jason picks up another ride-share customer, a young college kid named Noah (Ben Flohr) who’s just been reassigned to the night shift at the grocery where he works. Noah tries to escape without knowing what he’s up against – when Jason overshoots his destination Noah says he can walk the rest of the way and Jason insists on keeping him in the car – and when Jason offers Noah a bottle of water, Noah makes the huge mistake of accepting it. Of course the “water” is spiked with a fast-acting poison and Noah dies an excruciating death in Jason’s stolen vehicle. Then Jason forces Sarah to dig a D.I.Y. grave and bury Noah’s body in it, and afterwards Jason drives her out to the home of her friend Gayle and leaves Sarah helplessly tied up inside the car as Jason goes in and kills Gayle with a knife. Jason and Sarah end up at an all-night diner at which the waitress on duty notices that Sarah is showing all the signs of being an abused woman and calls the police. Unfortunately, when the police officer arrives Jason is holding a gun on Sarah and telling her to tell the cop that nothing’s wrong between them, she’s there of her own free will and everything is nice. When the cop gets suspicious because Jason won’t let him get Sarah to talk to her one-on-one without Jason there, Jason shoots and kills the cop and shoots and kills the waitress as well. But before this happened Sarah managed to call 911 and, though she was only able to give the cops a partial description of the car, that’s enough for the police to be on high alert, especially when they radio the officer who went to the diner and get no response.

They set up a roadblock hoping to cut Jason off from any potential escape route, but Jason drives the SUV right through the cop cars that are supposed to block him. Eventually Jason’s car crashes, we see a broken body on the pavement, and all parties – the police, Sarah and the audience – assume it’s he. Sarah ends up at the home of her boyfriend Matt (Chase Mullins), only Jason, not dead after all, is waiting for them outside. Jason kills Matt and chases Sarah throughout the house with the rifle with which he killed Matt, telling her that he’s already killed everyone near and dear to her and she should just accept that she’s going to die at his hands, too. Eventually the cops trace Sarah to Matt’s house and Sarah is able to kill him, and the final scene is Sarah at a self-help meeting for abused women. This hints that Sarah and Jason had a relationship and Jason is a vengeful ex who came back to avenge himself against her à la Patrick Bergin’s character in Sleeping with the Enemy – but there’s no way that Sarah would not have acknowledged him instead of just getting in his car and thinking he was just another “UR” ride-share driver. Later we see a text message exchange between Jason and someone else in which Jason says he’s picked up the “merchandise” and his confederate texts back, “It looks like some contents shifted during transit” – which suggests that Jason is a human trafficker who had kidnapped Sarah to sell her to a ring of pimps and traffic her.

Either of those would have given Jason a more comprehensible motive for his villainy than the non-motivation we get here: the Jason we see just gets it in his head one fine night to start killing people willy-nilly. While there are true-life cases like that – seemingly normal, well-adjusted people whose psyches go haywire and they start knocking people off – it doesn’t make for very good drama. I was a bit puzzled by the warning at the start of the film that it contains disturbing images ahd some viewers might not want to see this. Judging from the movie, I think what they were warning us about was director/writer Everett’s penchant for gore. This is one of the most explicit films I’ve ever seen on Lifetime in terms of its depiction of blood and guts – literally. Everett and his cinematographer, Erick Turcios, are fond of shoots of blood picturesquely dripping, drop by crimson drop, from one or another of Jason’s victims – especially the ones he’s knifed to death rather than shooting them. It all gets tiresome and doesn’t add much to the overall appeal of the movie, though I suspect it was actually shot for theatrical release (not until the very end of the movie do we even get a title credit!) and the theatrical version of Driven to Murder was even bloodier than the relatively sanitized one we got on Lifetime.