Gran Turismo seems the type of film that should succeed. In an unusual spin on the video-game-to-film genre, it’s not really an adaptation of the game. This is for two reasons — first, because Gran Turismo, the massively successful franchise of Sony PlayStation games, is a game without a story. It’s a simulation, or “sim,” as the movie endlessly feels the need to remind us, meaning that you’re not playing a character. You’re just racing. That’s it. You race cars, you increase in standing, you get better cars, and the feedback loop continues ad infinitum. The advantage of adapting a product like this is that you can make your own story, as long as it has one or two tenuous connections to the game. This isn’t necessarily a guaranteed formula for success, as anyone who’s seen 2014’s goofy adaptation of Need for Speed can attest to (although I freely admit to enjoying that dumb puppy of a film).
The second reason is the more important one — Gran Turismo, or Gran Turismo: Based on a True Story if we’re to use its exhaustively long full title — purports to not be an adaptation so much as it is a biopic. This is where things get interesting because it is a biopic. It tells the story of real-life gamer-turned-racer Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), an English kid who enters a competition to gain a chance to attend the GT Academy, wherein the first-place student is awarded a contract to race professionally for Team Nissan. Mardenborough wins the contest, beats the others in the academy, and does indeed go on to race professionally. Remarkably, this is all true, and the film hews closely to the general details of Mardenborough’s life, including a horrific crash that kills a spectator. It doesn’t fudge the truth too much — it doesn’t suddenly make him a world champion (he’s only won one race), because honestly, the achievement in and of itself is impressive (and crazy) enough.
When the film is showing those races, it shines. Director Neil Blomkamp has a keen eye for action and choreography, and it’s demonstrated to a breathtaking degree here. The races in Gran Turismo are honest-to-goodness, edge-of-your-seat bangers, making audience members lean forward and hold their breath as they watch these machines rocket around turns and risk life and limb for that chance at glory.
The film culminates with the grueling 24 Hours of Le Mans race in France, and it is terrifically filmed. Similarly, the GT Academy parts are fun and exciting, in no small part due to David Harbour doing the heavy lifting as racing coach Jack Salter, grumpily imparting cynical and barely motivational cliches like a dour, hulking Yoda. Young Madekwe gives an enthusiastic, if not particularly adept turn as Jann and that raw exuberance goes a long way to making the character likeable.
The film is fun, when, as it likes to try to beat into our heads, it’s about the racing. The problems arise when it tries to be about anything other than the racing. There’s a clumsily written family dynamic, wherein Jann butts heads with his pragmatic father Steve (played with quiet gravitas by the always-reliable Djimon Hounsou). The film shows Steve constantly on Jann’s case about only wanting to play video games, and Jann constantly shooting back about how his father doesn’t respect his dreams of racing … except that, well, Steve is sort of right? Jann does only play video games! It’s not like he’s out there working on tracks or in a garage. What parent wouldn’t be frustrated with their adult son who lives at home and works a dead-end job while playing PlayStation all night? Trying to portray Steve as the unreasonable one was, well, ridiculous.
Throw in a half-assed dynamic with his soccer-playing older brother and a performance by Gerri Halliwell as his mother who only seems to know how to gasp and wring her hands, and the whole subplot is wasted space. Similarly, the nearly pointless romance between Jann and Audrey (Maeve Courtier-Lilley) is given so little screentime one would think that it was added in during post-production, like an afterthought or a missing special effect.
Where the film really starts to grind its gears is its relentless marketing. Racing is, obviously, an intensely advertising-heavy sport, and yes, one of the main characters is the gently sleazy marketing executive Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom, doing his absolute best to be nothing more than fine). However, it’s a ceaseless barrage of logos and advertisements, making the film often feel like little more than a two-hour and fifteen-minute ad for PlayStation.
Ironically, part of Moore’s pitch when trying to create GT Academy is that he wants to use the Academy’s talent to bolster advertising for racing, while the film does the opposite. The film makes much of the dream of game creator Kazunori Yamauchi’s dream to make a simulation as realistic as possible (and it’s true - the Gran Turismo games are jaw-droppingly realistic).
Have you ever read about that study about American football? About how the game takes roughly three hours, but the ball is actually in play for only about eleven minutes? The rest is filler, ads, and timeouts. That’s how Gran Turismo sometimes feels. There’s about 45 minutes of absolutely spectacular racing to watch, maybe another 30 minutes of glorious Harbour grouchiness, and a bit of Madekwe being charmingly plucky as all get-out. The problem is there’s at least another hour of film to be watched, and that part is an absolute slog of tired dialogue, cliched writing, and meandering subplot that likely does a disservice to the remarkable life of young Jann Mardenborough. Gran Turismo is definitely fun; unfortunately, that’s only when it really is about the racing. The rest of the time, it comes to a screeching halt.
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