Drive Hard: The Maloof Way

Car Masters, now this..

Over-edited, over-scripted, and cheesy all around. What's the point of including several drone shots of a 50 km/h race? Everything is so slow and predictable...

The show follows Sammy Maloof (father and "leader" of the family) the most. You can take what he says in the trailer and that's pretty much what he will have to say for the entire season. Then Netflix decides to edit every sentence to have control on meaning and rythme. It makes it so unnatural, you wonder what's true and what isn't.

It feels like those cheap movies with trending actors. Why is Netflix producing all these "fast-food" shows?

And I binge watched this while my husband sat on his phone constantly showing me videos of real races. He claims this show is fake and staged.... Not even intrigued with the cars.

I thought he would like this show since he owns a Scat Pack, but he ended up nitpicking it.

The twins made me laugh, they were always dolled up for the camera! And the oldest daughter was always a cute hot mess working in the garage. It's a cute family dynamic they have going on in this show.... No matter how "fake" it may be.

But again, I'm a woman with no knowledge of cars and I found this interesting. My husband with lots of knowledge wasn't a fan.

It would be great to see a show filmed and edited for real gear heads, even a scripted one, but this ain't it. All kinds of nonsensical commentary from the daughter just for sound bytes. Things like tuning the distributor in a late model production car instantly turns off anyone who knows anything about them.

The stunt stuff is overly dramatized and looks like a weak attempt to launch careers of the daughters. Two episodes was enough to see its just generic product placement fodder and vroom vroom porn for people who pretend to know the difference between blinker fluid and wiper blades. CG is essentially rendering stunt driving obsolete, might as well aim for modeling careers right?

We all know you didn't have 5 days to get a car ready for a race, nobody does that. Production, fpv drone pilots, track time, and a long list of other factors are scheduled well in advance. Why do they even pretend? If you didn't get it done in time, you wouldn't air it.

When are producers going to realize they are being outdone by amateur youtubers? Much better off watching the Hoonigan stuff on youtube, way cooler, better production values and real.

I really wanted to like this but I just couldn't. Honestly it's just boring. The family seems nice and after seeing Maloof and the daughter on Fastest Car I was really interested to see this. I was hoping it would show them building some cool cars and more importantly seeing how the stunts are planned, practiced and carried out. Car build shows are a dime a dozen so that aspect interested me less than the stunts. The problem is it's all so scripted and with no meat to any of the segments that it's completely unwatchable. They only show you some graphics about how they fixed up these cars, with no real context. Most people don't realize that a $5000 build on a race car won't get you far, but they never explain that so it just looks like they added an air filter and some tires...boring. The stunts are 15 seconds of this is what we are going to do, then 30 seconds for the shot you saw in the movie, then the daughters patting themselves on the back. The format is crap, the script is boring, and there are about 200 better car shows out there. Skip it.

I spent the majority of the time watching this show analysing how it got to air...

The conclusion I invariably came to was that the big guy (Sam) actually paid for the show to launch the careers of his daughters seeing that he'd been a stuntman in Hollywood for decades.

There were a few things that led me to that conclusion:

1. The format of the show isn't really 'connected'. Or rather, the only connection between parts of the show - stunts, race prep and racing - is that big guy has a daughter (or two) in each part.

2. In the stunt parts, the two daughters who apparently do that work in real life, are filmed standing still most of the time preening themselves doing little hair flicks in front of the camera. Also the stunt work they're doing doesn't really look like stunts to be honest. Big man seems to have that covered to be honest.

3. The eldest daughter and her love for cars and racing is obvious and she seems very talented. The family members she's got supporting her however look like they've been roped into it and are in real life completely inexperienced. This is evidenced by the fact that one of them is asked to get 'balanced' parts delivered and completely fails to do so even though that's a basic task within the race parts industry. In fact, it's not just weight but also after an engine has heated up that much, blueprinting is also another method I would have thought was used to check for heat warping but it wasn't mentioned. So that didn't quite make sense to me.

It's trying really hard to be something but ultimately falls short. Not for a lack of effort mind you. More like they just rolled the dice with this show and didn't quite make it.