Gran Turismo plays in select theaters beginning August 11, before opening wide August 25.
Gran Turismo is a slick, watchable hunk of cross-promotional pablum – a glorified infomercial with bona fide crowd-pleasing horsepower under the hood. What the movie is marketing is its own source material, the wildly popular series of racing video games that make up one of PlayStation’s biggest franchises. On the off chance that anyone in the audience isn’t already a fan, the film makes like the pushiest associate on the dealership floor, rattling off key features and waxing poetic about the genius of Polyphony honcho Kazunori Yamauchi (played onscreen by Takehiro Hira – though the actual Yamauchi turns up in a cameo as a sushi chef). Thankfully, the roar of engines eventually drowns out the sales pitch, though there’s still room for some product placement between bursts of stirring sports-movie cliché.
This might be the first video game adaptation that’s also based on a true story – namely, that of Jann Mardenborough, a British teenager who got the opportunity, in 2011, to convert his adolescence behind the virtual steering wheel (sold separately, and lovingly showcased in the movie) into a career of turning left at dangerously high IRL speeds. Gran Turismo plays fast and loose with the details of his unlikely Cinderella story, conforming it to a familiar beat-the-odds trajectory. Naturally, the first person young Jann (Archie Madekwe) has to prove wrong is his father (Djimon Hounsou), who has the nerve to gently suggest that being good at a driving game doesn’t qualify him to drive real race cars.
Of course, Gran Turismo isn’t just any old driving game. It’s an advanced driving simulator, someone explicitly clarifies – one of several lines of dialogue that feels like a note from Sony Interactive Entertainment. “I played the game, and it’s remarkable,” goes another, courtesy of ambitious Nissan executive Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom), who’s loosely modeled on GT Academy founder Darren Cox. Danny promises the suits that recruiting players into the professional racing circuit will help attract an untapped market of potential car buyers… which is probably some version of the line that got the movie made, too. Bloom plays these scenes like he’s starring in his own Air-like corporate biopic on the margins of the plot.
Winning the qualifying multiplayer match, Jann drifts into an extended basic-training montage that’s like Top Gun in miniature, complete with an inexplicably hostile, Iceman-like academy rival (Darren Barnet). He also falls under the skeptical, tough-love tutelage of a veteran race car driver played by David Harbour, continuing his mission to improve every middling Hollywood franchise play to which he becomes attached. Harbour sells all the hackneyed, expected mentor business: the aging-legend saltiness, the pit-stop pep talks, the eventual transformation into a true believer. If the movie occasionally grazes the genuine soul of something like Rocky, he’s a big reason why.
An opening showroom documentary on the legacy of Gran Turismo, which feels like something smuggled out of a stockholders meeting, bears the mark of director Neill Blomkamp (of District 9 fame and Chappie infamy). More than a decade after his plans for a big-screen Halo fell apart, Blomkamp has finally fulfilled his destiny to make a video game movie. It’s the right lane for him; absent any overreaching aspirations to allegory, Gran Turismo benefits from his 21st-century need for speed, which cuts the rise-to-fame boilerplate into a propulsive flurry.
At first, you wonder if the filmmaker has the chops for the gig. An early joy-ride getaway from the cops is hard to follow, and Blomkamp makes the rather boneheaded unforced error of montaging straight through Jann’s first time in the driver’s seat, which should have the awe of a religious experience, not the skippable anticlimax of a cutscene. But the director acquits himself well during the actual race sequences, which steadily escalate into pageants of deafening sound and breathtaking velocity. Blomkamp jumps all over the racetrack, swooping overhead via dramatic drone shots, pulling in tight on the tense faces of the drivers, fetishizing the ins and outs of the automobile. He stylistically freeze-frames position changes, merging authentic race logistics with the visual language of the games. And he gives a late freak accident a scary majesty (though where the crash arrives in the timeline of events, right before the final act, is yet another way that the movie fudges facts).
Gran Turismo has the hum of a modern blockbuster machine, but its storytelling mechanics are decidedly old-school. It’s a rags-to-riches fairy tale simulator. Jann, the quintessential underdog, has to overcome not just his own doubts but also those of snooty European race royalty (they dub him “the gamer”) and even his own naysaying pit crew. It’s him versus the whole money-buys-ranking pro-racing establishment, though it’s pretty rich positioning multinational behemoths Sony and Nissan as the scrappy little guys. The movie eventually goes full Ford PvP Ferrari with a climactic bid for respect at the world’s most notoriously challenging race, 24 Hours of Le Mans.
What we’re watching, ultimately, is a wish-fulfillment fantasy, albeit one drawn from the real-life leaderboards. Jann, whose hours upon hours of digital experience gives him a new outlook on racing (he can see lines to pass his professional competitors don’t), is himself a walking, pedal-pressing commercial for the benefits of logging time with a controller. Not since “video games help with your hand-eye coordination” has the target demo been gifted a more convincing case for the tangible benefits of their pastime. Play enough games, Gran Turismo says, and maybe you too could have a future in motorsport! So long as those games, of course, boast the stunning graphics, amazingly realistic car mechanics, and endless customization options of Gran Turismo 7, now available for the low, low price of $49.69.
Not since “video games help with hand-eye coordination” have gamers been gifted a more convincing case for the tangible benefits of their pastime
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