‘Drive – The Pretenders’ Review: Can a Fake Engagement Still Spark Real Heat?
Prime Video has a fresh romance in the fast lane, and ‘Drive The Pretenders’ wastes no time telling you what kind of ride it is. It adapts Tamara Lush’s Wattpad novel into a German language film of roughly a hundred minutes, produced by Bavaria Fiction with Amazon MGM Studios Germany. The pitch is as clean as it gets, a race car mechanic agrees to pose as the fiancée of the most scandalous driver on the circuit.
Lisa-Marie Koroll plays Sarah Jenkins, a mechanic with her sights set on becoming a professional driver. Amin Baahmed is Dante Annunziata, the champion whose public image badly needs repairing. Their arrangement is a business deal on paper, with Sarah’s family debts and her shot at proper training dangling as the reward.
Director Sergej Moya and writers Chris Silber and Malina Nnendi Nwabuonwor clearly know the sort of audience they are courting. This is a film built for viewers who love a lie that slowly curdles into something real, and that part of the formula works exactly as promised. What the film does with that formula is where my patience started to thin.
The biggest problem is how predictable everything feels. Every beat of the enemies to lovers journey lands precisely where you expect, and the grief both leads carry over lost relatives gets treated like a checkbox rather than a wound. Because the story never surprises, the central conflict takes ages to arrive and then gets resolved in a rush that barely lets the stakes register.
Sarah is the real casualty of that approach. She is introduced as a driven young woman with ambitions of her own, yet as the runtime ticks by her dream drifts into the background and she becomes little more than the love interest. It is a genuine shame, because Koroll gives her warmth and a stubborn streak that deserved a sturdier arc.
The chemistry between Koroll and Baahmed is the film’s best asset. They sell the bickering, the grudging respect and the moments where the act slips, and Baahmed carries Dante’s swagger with ease in what is a big leading role for him. The supporting cast is also stronger than the material strictly needs, with Inka Friedrich and Jeanette Hain playing the two mothers, and Gustav Schmidt and Lucie Heinze rounding out the circle.
On a purely visual level, this is a handsome production. Filming across Prague, Germany, the Amalfi Coast and the Brno circuits gives the story a glossy, jet set sheen, and the soundtrack has a few hooks that stick. The racing itself is nicely staged when it appears, though for a film with a title like this one, there is surprisingly little of it and almost nothing that makes your pulse jump.
That lack of velocity ends up defining the experience. The film keeps brushing up against more interesting ideas about fame, trust and ambition, then swerves away before any of them can cost the characters something. It cruises pleasantly, but it never really accelerates.
I came away mildly entertained and quietly frustrated, which is an awkward place to land. The leads are charming, the scenery is lovely and the premise has enough pull to keep you watching, but the thin writing and the sidelined heroine hold it back from the podium. For a cozy evening with low expectations, this will do the job, and I give it 5 out of 10.
Did ‘Drive The Pretenders’ win you over with its fake engagement romance, or did it stall for you too, let me know in the comments.
