Gran Turismo
There are some movies that are nearly good, almost great, and it’s infuriating because you know it could have been so much more. Neill Blomkamp’s “Gran Turismo” is a wonder of a crowd-pleaser, an oddball sports drama that refuses to believe in character; a work of art that sidesteps character development at every opportunity by opting for the easiest option available and then swerving away from formal experimentation for the sake of pure fun.
But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t invested in every race, lap and turn. Or that the climax didn’t tug successfully at my heartstrings as plucky Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a teenage gamer turned real life speed racer, crossed the finish line.
“Gran Turismo” is an unusual but recognizable biopic, a video game-inspired yarn with familiar strengths and recurring weaknesses. For one thing as Mardenborough likes to say the property upon which this film is based isn’t exactly a game, it’s a simulator. You don’t beat it; you master it. You don’t win cars or points or trophies, you earn licenses and compete in real races against real drivers who haven’t been programmed to lose (Blomkamp attempts to visualize such realism by having see through VFX cars pass through Mardenborough whenever he plays).
No one understands this better than marketing extraordinaire Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom), he goes to GT proposing a competition where the top seven gamers will train to become Nissan’s next factory driver, and recruits seasoned veteran crew chief/former driver Jack Salter (David Harbour) as their coach. It’s crazy risky stuff when Jack asks Moore what he gets out of this, Moore doesn’t really have an answer but Bloom makes even less sense with his wobbly portrayal, rendering Moore’s motivations incomprehensible and his character frustratingly shaky.
Mardenborough’s desires are a little easier to pin down. He wants to work on real cars. His father, Steve (Djimon Hounsou), is a former professional soccer player who now works odd jobs and only wants his son to be practical lest he end up like him old, broken and filled with regrets. We don’t get much time or interiority with any member of the Mardenborough family, he has a doting mother (Geri Halliwell) and a partying younger brother (Daniel Puig) who exist for the sake of rounding out our hero’s support system, but they can’t do much beyond that. At some party or another, Jann meets Audrey (Maeve Courtier-Lilley), whom he’ll keep up with via Instagram once it becomes clear that she’s going to be the dream girl on his screen forever. Which is a bummer, because she never gets the chance to evolve into anything else.
The young gamers turned drivers in GT Academy are again thin sketches. They are inert obstacles that serve only to pad out the biopic’s running time, and the more immediate narrative function of the Academy is as a site for Mardenborough and Jack’s budding rapport. The latter is skeptical that these keyboard warriors possess the physical and competitive acumen to become professionals, Jason Hall and Zach Baylin’s script plays an exhausting game of keep away about Jack’s tragic backstory (are we supposed to believe that Mardenborough, a perpetually online teenager, didn’t Google his trainer?).
It isn’t until Mardenborough moves past the Academy to real racing, where he competes against teams hostile to simulator racers, that Gran Turismo really kicks into gear. It’s hard not to hear characters say that sim drivers will never replace real drivers without thinking about the real life struggle SAG AFTRA and WGA face against AI even if Mardenborough is a real person, Blomkamp portrays him as a plucky outsider in the vein of his bobsledders from Cool Runnings; it’s this alignment of common sports movie tropes with real world concerns that makes for uneasy tension.
Those tropes do work to keep you engaged when on-screen storytelling doesn’t wholly deserve it. Colby Parker Jr. and Austyn Daines’ editing should match gameplay rhythms with virtual visuals, but instead freeze frames telling us what lap we’re on crush pace and frequently provide information redundant from dialogue.
Still, tropes are tropes because they work. For Mardenborough and Jack it’s us against the world; a rivalry between Mardenborough and an ultra-rich racing team adds some spice, a tragic crash gives Mardenborough a comeback story, a harrowing speech by the ever-dependable Hounsou puts the finishing touches on this underdog story and fully invests us in the cares of an unassuming teenager. Gran Turismo has bigger issues than what’s outlined here some nitpicky, others larger in scope (Madekwe as a lead is low-key to the point of invisibility) but Blomkamp does furnish just enough cautionary thrills.
For More Movies Visit Putlocker.