directed by Neill Blomkamp
written by Jason Hall, Alex Tse and Zach Baylin
On paper, the idea of adapting the Sony Playstation game Gran Turismo into a feature film is downright ridiculous. Unlike a huge percentage of Sony's game catalog, Gran Turismo, a driving simulator by nature, does not have any story elements whatsoever. Fortunately for Sony, though, they had an ace-in-the-hole that enabled them to crack this particular nut: the incredible true story of Jann Mardenborough, a kid from Cardiff, Wales, who won their GT Academy contest and actually went from being a gamer to an honest-to-goodness race car driver. Jann's story is very loosely adapted in this film by director Neill Blomkamp of District 9 fame.
In the film Gran Turismo (Based on a True Story) Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), an expert player of the Gran Turismo game, lands a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity when he gets to join the GT Academy, an elaborate marketing stunt dreamed up by Nissan marketing exec Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) to boost the sales of Nissan's cars. The idea is to recruit the world's best Gran Turismo players and turn one of them into a real racecar driver. Of course, the idea is insanely dangerous, and so Danny has recruited one-time racing prodigy Jack Salter (David Harbour) to oversee the training of these hopefuls, who hail from all over the world. Jann joins the contest over the objections of his father Steve (Djimon Hounsou) a former football player who thinks the whole endeavor is a waste of time, but Jann is determined to pursue his dream of becoming a racecar driver...no matter the risks.
Last year, I watched the adaptation of Uncharted starring Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg and basically hated it. It was an Uncharted film in pretty much name only, retaining none of the charm of any of the four games on which it was based, and quite frankly, didn't do the game any favors.
In contrast, this film, which is more a sports movie than an adaptation of the game which, as I mentioned, doesn't have any story to adapt, trots out nearly every cliche imaginable in sports movies, especially underdog stories, but my goodness, it works.
Thanks to a winning cast led by David Harbour and relative newcomer Archie Madekwe, who share fantastic chemistry as mentor and student, and some eye-popping racing sequences which make very creative use of drones and cameras mounted on really fast cars, Gran Turismo manages to be a wild ride from nearly start to finish. It admittedly takes a little while to get off the ground, but when it starts, the action doesn't stop.
Ironically enough, for a film based on a computer game, it makes minimal use of computer-generated imagery for its racing sequences, save for some pretty interesting visuals showing a car "assemble" around Jann as he drives in his game. The car racing scenes here are, I daresay, on par with the racing scenes from acclaimed motorsport-themed movies like Ron Howard's Rush or James Mangold's Ford v. Ferrari, in terms of camerawork, cinematography, sound-editing and just overall craft. They are genuinely spectacular and are, I would argue, the film's main draw.
A criticism often levelled at the film is that it is a plug for the game, and while I wholeheartedly agree that it is a plug, I don't consider this a bad point. It absolutely is a plug for the game, because that's the whole point of its existence. That is the whole point of the studio's existence, in fact: to get more people to buy the games. The filmmakers aren't chasing after Oscars or making deep commentary on the human condition; they're basically just making entertaining romps designed to whet people's appetite for video games and this film, in my opinion, fulfills its purpose.
I just consider myself lucky, as a viewer and a gamer, that I got a decent story and some pretty memorable action sequences in the bargain.
8/10
