Dave catches up with helmer Lev Spiro who tells him a bit about the, erm, ‘poor quality’ script he had to rewrite.

“Overdrive? Urgh. A shitty script I ended up rewriting. It’s not a great film, but I’m happy to tell you about it.”

You have to admire the candour of Lev Spiro – and I must admit, a glance at the cover of OVERDRIVE (1998) suggested a kind of proto version of The Fast and the Furious (2001), albeit with Steve Guttenberg and Robert Wagner. I mean, what’s not to love?

Well, quite a lot actually.

Matt Stricker (Guttenberg) is a madman behind the wheel of his racing car. Struggling to get over the loss of his wife and young child in a fender bender, he hits the track without a thought for his wellbeing, on a path of self-destruction. Thankfully, a chance encounter at a strip joint with Wendy (Kaela Dobkin) could be the route to his salvation – but she has her demons too, in the shape of two shadowy assassins in hot pursuit. Now it’s up to Stricker and Wendy to join forces in order to put their lives back on course, and for Robert Wagner to look incredibly cool in aviator specs.

In the midst of a career resurgence thanks to cameos in both Austin Powers (1997) and John McNaughton’s Wild Things (1998), it still raises an eyebrow to see Wagner as a pit boss in a Roger Corman production. Spiro, though, is effusive in his praise for the Hart to Hart icon:

“I had to see both Steve Guttenberg and Robert Wagner to convince them to do it. Wagner, I met in the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills! It was a condition of his that he had to meet the director ahead of doing the movie, just to check that I wasn’t a complete asshole. He was such a gentleman. He shows up on time, knows his lines, and is a consummate professional. The type of guy who would go round at the end of the day and shake the hands of the grips and various other crewmembers to say thank you.”

Sadly, Wagner winds up in more of a supporting slot with Guttenberg and Dobkin taking centre stage. They’re a rather ill-matched couple: Guttenberg rarely thrived in straight gigs (see: Airborne (1998)), and Dobkin, despite her ability, never gels in the part of a wily extortionist holding over a violent criminal for $10million.

In the nick of time, the final third kicks in with the action a little more. There’s some nice location work at the Elsegundo Power Plant, and the opportunity for Stephen Meadows to snarl at the camera effectively as the chief hoodlum. Keep your eyes peeled for the mighty Rick Dean as well. The Corman stalwart appears briefly as a seedy nightclub owner.

While peppered with dialogue drawn from the cliché tombola (“Racing is dangerous. It’s what I do”), the main flaw of Overdrive is the uneven clip at which it moves. Track scenes drag on [1], and they’re largely devoid of excitement, all of which have a knock-on effect in regard to any momentum that Spiro tries to build. Not that such a damning critique is news to the director:

“I delivered my cut at seventy-five minutes. Roger told me I’d done a great job, but that it had to be eighty minutes to fulfil our foreign obligations. So I had to add five minutes, mainly by stretching out the racing sequences – and they weren’t particularly exciting in the first place! When you have to add five minutes to a movie, it really affects the pacing, and I could feel it getting slower and slower – especially compared to that first cut, which I thought was really taut. Not that it was a masterpiece to begin with. I just don’t think it’s a particularly good film. So there you go.“

[1] The sequences were shot at the Willow Springs International Motorsports Park in Rosamond, California: the oldest road course in the U.S.